


Not Her

by TheLibraryBat



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (I thought after 8 chapters they deserved a day off), (in chapters 14-15), (possibly the only competent person), Angst, Arguing, Background Sasha James/Tim Stoker, Beholding!Sasha, Blood and Injury, Day At The Beach, Developing Friendships, Dubious Morality, During Canon, Fire, Friendly stabbing, Friendship, Friendship Treated As Seriously As Romance, Gen, General Spiral Nonsense, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Male-Female Friendship, Moral Dilemmas, Panic Attacks, Pre-Worm Attack, Protective Michael, Sad Ending, Sasha is the most competent person in the institute, Slight Possessive Behaviour, The Anglerfish - Freeform, World Travel, canon compliant if you squint, child endangerment, improper use of a chainsaw, it's a rocky road, it/its pronouns for michael, no betas we die like archival assistants, set in S1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-04 17:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 20
Words: 55,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25060135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLibraryBat/pseuds/TheLibraryBat
Summary: “I told you before. I want to be your friend."Sasha James is brilliant and doomed.When the monster that calls itself Michael begins following her around - saving her, a few times, from danger - she can't help but wonderwhy.As Sasha unravels the mystery of Michael Shelley - falling deeper into the clutches of Beholding all the while - Michael searches desperately for a way to save her from her fate. After all, Michael knows better than anyone what it is to be an assistant, and what it is to be doomed.
Relationships: Sasha James & Michael | The Distortion
Comments: 394
Kudos: 290





	1. Upon the Stair

**Author's Note:**

> **Art For This Fic:** [X](https://smallandknowingdyke.tumblr.com/post/640128885203386368/i-am-thinking-once-again-abt-the-fic-not-her)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I just have a lot of feelings about Michael and the assistants, okay. I know it's canon that it punishes Jon for Gertrude's actions, but does that have to mean it begrudges the Institute as a whole? What if the part of it that was born from Michael Shelley remembers how it felt to be in the assistants' shoes? What if, against its better instincts, it wants to spare them its own fate?
> 
> Also, Sasha James deserves the world and I wanted to write about her being clever and creative and badass.
> 
> (I wrote this in one night and gave it only the lightest of edits before posting, so my apologies if it's a little unpolished here and there. I didn't want my anxiety to get the better of me, so here it is before I change my mind. Bon appetit.)

Sasha does not spend a great deal of time ruminating on her encounter with the Distortion.

As far as she’s concerned, it was a fluke. A one-off. A rare side-effect of a _very_ weird job. It’s something to laugh about with Tim, and certainly _not_ something to think about at night when her head hits the pillow. (She _definitely_ doesn’t lose sleep over it. The encounter hadn’t scared her at the time, and it does not scare her now. If there are darker shadows under her eyes than there used to be – if she takes her coffee stronger these days, with a tremor in her hand as she stirs it – that’s a coincidence. Nothing more.)

Michael’s presence in the street below her building, its knowledge of her name, her colleagues’ names… none of it, she knows, had been personal. Worrying about _how_ it knew those things was like worrying how a phishing scam had found her email address. It didn’t matter how, not really. It only mattered that it had.

Their conversation in the café had _felt_ personal, sure. Especially when it had put its hand in hers. She can remember it now, every detail: the empty coffee mug, still crusted with foam from whatever had been in it, a slight dip marking where it had put the cup to its lips; the lilies languishing in their brown paper wrapper on the seat beside its knee; the blandly pleasant face she wouldn’t have glanced twice at if she hadn’t known better. That awful, alien hand. But she knew in the moment that it was only using her as a courier, talking to the Institute through her face. Its offer of friendship had not been aimed at her, though it was she who watched its mouth curl into a smile around the words.

“ _I want to be your friend_ ,” it had said, and it had drawn out the word _friend_ like a question.

* * *

It is waiting for her, this time, in the stairwell.

The same stairwell whose windows she first spied it through, mere days ago, though the world outside is so bleak now – the late-night streets so empty – she can’t fool herself into believing it’s there to take in the view. The sight of its lanky frame - its back turned, silhouetted in the dark and winding space - sends a shock like ice water through her veins. She fights a shudder and keeps walking.

There’s no choice. She has to pass it if she wants to get into her flat.

Its hair is haloed orange in the glow of the streetlamps outside. She could, she supposes, spend the night at Tim’s. He might laugh at her initially, but he would be good about it once she explained. He would set her up on his sofa, with those cushions that always made her sleepy during movie nights, and he would make her a hot drink and stay up chatting and watching old Vine compilations with her until she felt better.

“That one’s Elias when he hasn’t had his morning latte,” he would say.

“That one’s Jon when Martin does literally _anything_ ,” she would answer.

She wants to do it. Wants to turn and go, and leave Michael with no choice but to find another messenger.

She doesn’t.

Three steps closer, she considers the Institute. Martin will be there, sleeping on the spare cot in the filing room, but there might be space for her to wriggle in, awkwardly, keeping her back to his. She doubts he sleeps well anyway, not with Prentiss circling the place like a shark. He might appreciate the company. Might read her some of his poetry. A night spent nodding and pretending to like it would be better, surely, than _this_.

She reaches the landing. A metre separates her from the Distortion now. With its back still turned, she's tempted to walk right past it, but there isn’t enough space to give a convincing performance of simply not having seen it there. If she keeps walking, its coat will brush against hers. She will, at minimum, have to mutter “Whoops, sorry,” and it will know that she's avoiding it. It might turn to face her. Might _grab_ her. And what then?

Sasha stops walking.

“You again,” she says.

It doesn’t turn. One of its hands – deceptively normal, with prominent tendons and bitten-down nails – is playing against the mottled window-glass. The index finger and thumb are stained dark, like it's been twiddling a leaky biro between them. Sasha hadn’t noticed this little touch before, too preoccupied with the overall picture; with trying to catch distorted glimpses of it in the polished salt-and-pepper shakers.

Now, she says – with a boldness she doesn’t feel – “Nice illusion. Very thorough.”

It says nothing; just goes on tapping its fingers on the glass. They may look like the soft, rounded fingertips of a human, but the noise they make against the glass betrays them. _Clack, clack, clack_. She wishes it would stop.

“You know, I didn’t actually plan on spending my evening loitering with monsters on the stairs,” she says. “If you’re here to _help_ like last time, please get to it. I want to take off my coat and my shoes.”

Eventually, it deigns to acknowledge her. “I can see why you enjoy this window.”

“Again, please get to it, or I’m going.”

The monster rolls its shoulders – a languid gesture that takes far longer than it needs to – and does not turn to face her. “Did it ever cross your mind that you could take your shoes off the moment you enter your building? Such an arbitrary rule, to wait until you cross the threshold of your own living space, even when it _aches_. You're indoors. Your feet will not get hurt.”

Sasha answers it by turning on her heel and starting up the next flight of stairs. It lets her go. The last she sees of it, it’s still there, its long, crooked fingers _clack-clack-clack_ ing on the glass.

* * *

The next time Sasha finds it on the stairwell, it’s a Sunday, and she’s lugging three heavy bags of groceries up the stairs. This time, it twists around to face her at once.

“What have you there?”

“Food,” she says. “Toilet roll. Tampons. I guess it’s all quite novel to you.”

She doesn’t mean for the words to sound as terse as they do. Only once they’re out does she register what a bad idea it is to get snippy with a monster. Michael only smiles, closed-mouthed, and reaches out a hand.

“What?” she asks it.

“Would you like a hand?”

Sasha falters. She knows the logical answer: _No, thank you, I’m fine. Please leave._

But she also knows, by now, that this thing doesn’t run on normal-person logic.

And she remembers with a start that _neither does she._

Most ten-year-old kids would see a weird bug in the playground and run from it, shrieking and exclaiming, “ _Euww_!” Ten-year-old Sasha would see a weird bug in the playground and sit with it until the bell rang for class. Talking to it. Sketching it. Taking careful notes.

She’s curious. She always has been. It’s why she works at the Magnus Institute.

And so, she hands Michael one of her shopping bags – it’s heavy, full of tins, but its arm doesn’t dip under the weight – and then puts down the other two in order to unlace her shoes. “Thank you. One moment.”

Michael makes no comment as she shucks the shoes and tucks them under her elbow, but it looks rather pleased.

“How was your day?” it asks, when she resumes walking.

“I only woke up an hour ago,” she answers, aiming for the breezy, casual honesty she might use in a passing chat with Martin. It doesn’t feel right to treat Michael like a close friend, but she doesn’t want to upset it. A work-friend dynamic is an easy compromise to make. “Not much of a day yet,” she goes on, “but the weather’s nice and my bags haven’t split, so I can’t complain. How's yours?”

It blinks at her, working its mouth, and Sasha can’t help the rush of pride that comes with confounding the Distortion. She watches as it knits its brows, shaking its head like its brain is a snow globe and it needs to stir the glitter from its thoughts in order to see them more clearly. “I forget,” it manages.

“The time? Yeah, me too.”

She isn’t sure how she understood what it meant, but its smile is enough to tell her that she understood correctly. A small smile, much smaller and simpler than the last dozen. She senses that this one, of all of them, is the closest to real.

“It’s easy to lose track when you’re distracted,” she adds. “Or busy. Or… _you_ , I guess.”

“Yes. Days are arbitrary things.”

“Like rules about shoes?”

“Like rules about shoes.”

What a strange way it speaks, she thinks. Choosing words like _arbitrary_ , where words like _silly_ or _pointless_ might carry the sentiment just as well. Like the details of its illusion, she wonders what goes into the makeup of its vocabulary. Why _arbitrary_ , and why the biro-smudges on its hand? It claims to exist beyond comprehension – “ _How would a melody describe itself_?” she remembers it asking, as if daring her to ask what on Earth it meant by that – but there are always, always threads to pull. And Sasha didn’t get her job for nothing. She knows how good she is at pulling threads.

“This is me,” she says, when they arrive outside her door. She drops the shopping bags and fumbles with her key.

Michael taps the door with that same _clack-clack_ ing noise. “This is _you_?”

“This is where I live. Want to come in?”

It nods and follows her inside.

* * *

Michael barely talks to her as she unpacks her shopping. Sasha doesn’t try and encourage conversation. She's content to sneak glances at it from the relative safety of her kitchenette; to study it as it prowls about her living room. The Distortion is a stick insect in a shoebox, and she, the child with a magnifying glass.

It looks taller in the low-ceilinged space. Taller and, simultaneously, less formidable. (The loss of its power to frighten her may or may not have coincided exactly with the moment it hit its head on the paper lantern covering the ceiling bulb.) She watches as it picks up a photo frame: one containing a picture of her childhood dog. It smiles an idle smile and sets the frame back in place, moving on to examine her books. They're displayed on a cheap flat-pack shelving unit Tim helped her to throw together when she moved here. Most of them are sketchily-peer-reviewed supernatural studies, which she bought for research purposes, though she has some sci-fi and horror paperbacks crammed here and there. Michael extracts a copy of _The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet_ , flips through its pages – upside-down – and puts it back in the exact place it found it. Odd, for a creature of disarray, she thinks.

She tucks the thought away with the biro stain and its vocab choices.

Eventually, Michael grows bored of her living room and sidles into the kitchen, where it starts to fiddle with the letter-magnets on her fridge.

“Having fun?” she asks it.

Michael pauses, repeating its motion of shaking its head to clear its thoughts. “Yes,” it decides. “I visit many houses, but I am rarely invited.”

Her groceries are all packed away now. She should ask the thing to leave – knows she should – but her hands have busied themselves in the familiar ritual of brewing instant coffee, and without thinking, she has set two mugs down on the counter.

“That must be lonely,” she says.

It wrinkles its nose. “Ugh. _Lonely_.”

“What are you writing?” she asks while the kettle boils. Michael messes up the letters on the fridge door before she can get a glimpse at whatever it was trying to spell.

“I can’t read,” it says, with a burst of laughter like startled birds taking flight. “Or write. Letters are—”

“Arbitrary?”

“Precisely.”

She doesn’t call it out on what was obviously a panicked lie. Instead, she serves Michael its coffee, which it drinks with her at the kitchen counter in an odd, peaceful quiet. She studies it more as it swings its legs and runs its biro-stained fingertip around the mug’s rim. It’s wearing a thick coat – thicker than one would typically choose for English springtime – which could matter, but could just as easily be another pointless contradiction. Underneath, she catches the peek of a collared shirt, buttoned not-quite to the throat. With its free hand, it winds a lock of blond hair around its finger, coiling it tight before letting it spring free. Again and again.

Eventually, it leaves. She doesn’t hurry it, but nor does she invite it to linger. The end of its visit comes with the familiar awkwardness of any two almost-friends parting ways. It smiles too wide when it makes its excuses and actually _looks at its wrist_ , though there isn’t a watch there. Sasha pulls an “It was nice to see you,” from somewhere, and it nods and agrees.

When it’s finally gone, she feels a fluttering relief, mixed with a weird exhilaration.

And then she turns to the fridge, which reads, in a mess of childish rainbow letters:

**dOnT L3t THeM taKe U AL!ve**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this and I hope you enjoyed it! I haven't written fanfiction in several years, and never for TMA, so I'm quite excited and nervous. Please let me know what you thought and whether you'd like to see more chapters of this.
> 
> (I have a lot of other thoughts about Michael, particularly its choice to buy the lilies. If anyone wants to read That story, please let me know, as I am sorely tempted to write it but lacking the current motivation amid COVID-19 Hell.)


	2. Finsbury Park

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha isn't sure she likes the recent uptick of supernatural encounters in her life. But Michael is, perhaps, starting to grow on her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I’d like to say thank you to everyone for giving such a positive reception to chapter one. It’s been a long time since I shared my writing online and I missed the sense of community; I look forward to chatting more about these characters and worlds!
> 
> Content warnings and new tags will be added as I go.

It’s already dark when Sasha emerges from Finsbury Park Station, and any lingering heat of the day has long since dissipated in the lamplit streets. This is hardly surprising. Work at the Institute often carries her past her six o’clock finish, and – although she isn’t paid for staying late – she finds that she sleeps better knowing a clear desk awaits her in the morning.

Tonight, though, she regrets her decision not to call it sooner. Her route home is a quick one, but in the twenty minutes she spent underground – packed between impatient and jostling commuters – the wind has picked up significantly, and a light drizzle begun to spot the pavements. She wishes she’d worn a thicker cardigan, or had the foresight to stow a raincoat in her bag. One of the fold-up ones. She’s never been very good at re-folding them, but that concerns her far less at the moment than what her walk might look like, should the rain pick up.

Of course, no sooner than she’s thought it, the rain does just that.

Sasha scurries towards the nearest bus shelter, torn between running full-tilt and not wanting to drop the armful of ring binders she has clutched to her chest. The shelter protects her from the ice of the rain, thankfully, but does little to spare her from the bite of the wind. If the rain carries on too long, she thinks, she’ll just have to face it. For now, she dallies there with aching arms, watching dirty water eddy down a storm drain and grinding up little bits of broken glass under the heel of her shoe. This neighbourhood is truly a delight.

* * *

A flat voice breaks her reverie.

“You dropped this.”

Sasha lifts her head, replacing her view of the chewing-gum-studded paving stones with a face just as grey and dull to look at. A stranger is hovering next to the mouth of the shelter, arm outstretched. It’s holding a wallet, but the wallet isn’t hers.

“I’m sorry,” she tells it, unsure – as she does – whether she’s looking at a man, a woman, or actually, a person at all. Its face remains impassive. “That’s not mine,” she clarifies. “Someone else must’ve—”

“You dropped this,” it repeats.

Its mouth doesn’t move.

Sasha feels her stomach sink, remembering the first statement Jon read for the Archives. She and Tim had swiped it to get a feel for their new boss, and wound up tipsily mimicking him over greasy takeout okonomiyaki. It had been funny then. It isn’t now. Not when she’s alone in the dark, just shy of an easy running distance from her flat. Not when the creature Jon had dubbed the “anglerfish” is staring at her, still holding that wallet.

“Get away from me,” she stutters. “Go on. Uh – _shoo_.”

“You dropped this.”

“I don’t want it.”

“You dropped this.”

Sasha steps back, feeling the walls of the shelter press in against her. She can’t tell whether the rain has gotten harder on its roof or the drumming she hears is merely her own blood in her ears. She doesn’t know what to do. Run? What if it chases her? She only has one shot – and she’s never been athletic.

“You dropped—”

“ _Man-dy_!”

At once, the stranger stops talking. The arm proffering the wallet dangles limply in the air, impossible to see now as anything other than bait. Sasha retreats further, ducking out of the shelter and into a cool spray of rain. The voice that interrupted them is a bright and joyous thing, made more so by the darkness and the panic still thudding through her chest. She seeks its owner with desperate eyes.

It belongs to a young man on the far side of the road, now half-skipping across the rain-slick tarmac in his haste to reach them. He is dressed much better for the weather than she is, in a thick coat with the hood pulled up, though as he moves, blond curls tumble from it. Sasha is so relieved to see someone – _anyone_ – that a sob swallows her answering hello. She’s so relieved that it takes her a moment to recognise the man. Then she sees his – _its_ – reflection in the puddles. Recognition clicks into something more like dread.

“You didn’t tell me you would be in town this week,” says Michael, slinging an arm around her shoulders and squeezing her too-tight against its side. Its body feels impossibly sharp against her; not sharp like a knife is sharp, but sharp like a lemon is sharp. Its cheeks are pink from the cold, its lips chapped around its grin. Sasha doesn’t know how it can be what it is and still look so _human_. “Gosh, I’ve missed you! We have so much to catch up on!”

Sasha laughs nervously, flicking a glance towards the anglerfish. It’s already gone, folded back into the dark.

“Come on, let’s get you out of this weather,” says Michael, almost obliviously. “I need to know what you’ve been up to since the last time we hung out. When was that – Christmas? No, it can’t have been Christmas. I must’ve seen you since.”

It continues to prattle on like that as they cross back over the street. Sasha is too grateful to be putting distance between herself and the anglerfish to worry about where Michael might be taking her. Too bewildered to talk. It’s all she can do to stick to Michael’s side, its long legs striding one step for every two or three of hers. She doesn’t know when she put her free arm around its waist, but fear grips her far too tightly for her to consider letting go.

She considers its approach as they walk; how it called her by a different name, and made up a story about them being friends. It wanted to fool the anglerfish – to look like a normal human – she supposes, though _why_ it would choose that tactic instead of going full monster, she doesn’t know. Questions for later, she decides. There are much more urgent ones to ask it now.

“How did you find me?” she starts, not expecting an answer.

Michael shakes its head, and when it speaks, it's without the bubbly human pretence. “I never lost you.”

“Fine. Why did you save me?”

“I told you that before. I want to be your friend. Oh... before I forget, don’t take this route anymore. The Stranger will remember you.”

“The Stranger? Is that what it’s called?”

It nods. “The Stranger. I Do Not Know You. It goes by many names.”

“What does it want?”

“To kill you, probably. Not to be your friend.”

“Well, then,” Sasha manages. “I suppose I should thank you.”

Michael shrugs its shoulder – a weird sensation against her side – and says nothing. As they continue to walk, heading in no obvious direction, it catches up with Sasha that she very nearly lost her life tonight. The thought is as sudden and disorienting as missing a step on a flight of stairs. The Stranger was going to kill her. It was going to kill her, and if Michael hadn’t intervened, it would have succeeded.

Michael stops walking. “Are you alright?”

“Yes. No. I think I’m having a panic attack.”

The monster manoeuvres her over to a bench and helps her settle, hunched forward with her head bowed. They’re in the park, she realises. Surrounded by great swathes of grass and towering London Plane trees that look lovely by day, but dark and wrong in the night. Michael pries the ring binders from her grasp and sets them down on the bench at her side. She grips its hand instead, fingernails digging into the flesh between its tendons, or whatever it has instead of flesh and tendons. It’s kneeling on the gravel before her, its lanky frame angled so that it can look her right in the eyes.

“Count to seven,” it tells her.

Unthinkingly, she obeys.

Its eyes are almost normal, but for a slight iridescent sheen – like the skin of a bubble – which dances over the corneas. She holds its gaze as she counts, up and down, breathing and holding her breath as it directs her. When her chest no longer feels like it’s about to explode, she lets go of its hand. “Thank you. Sorry about that.”

Michael shrugs again. Sasha wonders when she stopped viewing it as a threat. Maybe she never did, though she doesn’t think that’s true; it rattled her the night she found it loitering on the stairs.

“I will tell the Stranger in no uncertain terms to leave you be,” it says now.

“Will it listen?”

“Doubtful. Stand up – are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine.” Sasha lets it pull her to her feet, though she balks when it begins stalking around her in a circle, scrutinising her for visible wounds. “I – _no_! It didn’t get a scratch on me.”

Michael lifts her arms to check her torso underneath them. It circles her twice more, perhaps a little frantically, before it appears satisfied. “Good.”

“Why?”

“I apologise for this.”

Pain slices Sasha’s thoughts to ribbons before she can ask what it’s apologising for. Her shoulder – the same spot it had dug the worm from – blazes with it. Michael jabs deeper this time, not questing for a worm but aiming simply to _hurt_. The skin rends. Dark blood blossoms on her sleeve. Its finger twists and drives and when she tries to stagger backwards, it grabs her with its other hand and holds her steady. She can't read the look in its eyes, but she sees the set of its jaw, the firm straight line of its mouth, and it’s the least human the thing has ever looked.

Somehow, she still isn’t afraid.

When it withdraws its hand, there is a gush. The pain ebbs away, returning duller and, somehow, worse. Sasha lifts her good arm smacks the monster in the chest. “What the _Hell_ was that?”

“I failed to leave a mark last time,” says Michael, though the wound had, in fact, left behind a small red scar. “You will never be quite out of reach from the Stranger, but a mark from me might help to dissuade it.”

Sasha blinks, remembering its words from before: _I will tell the Stranger in no uncertain terms to leave you be._

“Oh,” she says, when it clicks. “Please tell me you’re not talking about monster dibs.”

It smiles. “I suppose I am.”

“So, what? This cut is – like a post-it on a carton of milk? ‘ _Michael’s, get your own_ ’?”

Michael frowns. “No. You are not mine.”

“Then whose am I?”

“You are _yours_. The cut is… hm. I suppose its purpose _is_ to make the Stranger think you’re mine. Better for you to be perceived as such than for it to think you free game.”

“But it’s a trick,” Sasha says.

“Yes.”

The cut throbs and Sasha can feel the wetness of it sticking to her sleeve. Her cardigan is ruined. “Well,” she says. “I’d appreciate it if you _asked_ next time.”

“I’m sorry,” it says, and it looks it.

They stand in silence for a few awkward moments before Sasha remembers the time. “I should get home,” she says. “No, wait. I should go to A&E.”

“Would you like a door?”

Sasha is about to ask what it means when she sees the yellow door set into the trunk of a nearby tree. It should be too wide to fit, but somehow – through a twisting of dimensions that hurts her brain to think about – it fits anyway. Michael gestures sweepingly towards it and she can’t even be surprised, though she has never seen it pull this trick before.

“Is it dangerous?” she asks.

“No more dangerous than me.”

Sasha takes a moment to think about that, feeling the steady pulse of pain at her shoulder as it beats in time with her heart. Michael says nothing, pretending to examine its nails. Its thumb and forefinger are slick with her blood, now, which mingles darkly with the biro smudge. She wonders whether the bloodstain will become as permanent as the ink.

Eventually, the rain makes her decision for her. It had let up while they had been walking, but it begins its patter once again, now. Its drops are chillier and heavier than they had been before.

With one last tremulous glance around the park, Sasha steels herself. She has made up her mind.

She opens the door.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and would really appreciate your thoughts on it. I started on this chapter immediately after reading the first responses, spurred on by a surge of warm and fuzzy feelings. I can't promise all future updates will be as quick as this one, nor am I in the mood currently to implement a strict update schedule, though I will try not to let this fic languish for too long without updating.
> 
> (Also, if anyone has any suggestions for future interactions/little things they might like to see, let me know! I’m planning on writing more chapters of this, and I know where it will end, but I’m kind of winging it for the time being.)


	3. Open Access

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha starts pulling threads.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three chapters in three days! I swear I never write this much in such a short span of time. I don’t know what’s up with me, but it’s good writing practise so I’m not gonna complain.  
> This chapter takes a bit of a nosedive into Sasha’s research process, because I love her and I wanted to show off her skills. I’m not a librarian, but my mother is, and (since I accidentally got her into TMA as well) I feel like I owe it to her to write something semi-technical, even if I don’t let her see it!  
> Thank you again to those who left such lovely feedback. It really helps.  
> Without further ado:

Sasha does two things when she arrives home from the hospital.

First, she grabs her laptop and emails Jon. The screen blurs before her eyes, which itch with longing to fall shut. Six hours in the A&E department past midnight will do that to you, she figures. Six hours propped up on a gurney, feeling blood dry tackily against her shoulder, with only a thin blue curtain shielding her from the chaos of a hallway filled with drunks, tired nurses and at least one crying child. Just thinking about it makes her eyelids heavier. And even with the painkillers swirling through her system, she can feel a headache budding.

She manages:

_Hi Jon,_

_I hope this email makes sense, I have taken morphine so it might not. Sorry for the short notice but I won’t be coming in tomorrow (possibly not until next week.) Got stabbed. Sorry. There are stables in my skin._

_It was a mugging. STABLES. I’m not going to correct that even though I meant staples because I read it back and now I can’t stop laughing_

_Okay on a more serious note yes I did get stabbed but I will be okay. However I would like to take the week off so that I can feel my arm again when I come back. If there is urgent work, send it over and I’ll try to do it from home! The doctor said I should get a sick note through by tomorrow, which of course means it will take about three days if I’m lucky._

_Thanks boss,_

_Sasha. :D_

_P.S. Don’t let Martin take my cases lmao I have a system and bless him, I love him but he will wreck it_

It’s gone three in the morning, so Jon likely won’t see it until he’s at his desk tomorrow, wondering where on Earth she is. Unfortunately, that can’t be helped. At least, she thinks, he can’t fault her for getting stabbed. Extenuating circumstances and all that.

Next, she loads up Word and makes a list, titled: _Things I know about Michael._

It’s not what she wants to be doing. Given the choice, right now, she would be lying face-down in bed, groaning with self-pity until sleep was kind enough to claim her – except she doesn’t want to forget. It’s not that Michael is _forgettable_. It’s just that there’s this itch under her skin. This need, stronger than the need for a good night’s sleep. The need to type, to record, to see the words staring back at her irrefutably from a place more solid and steadfast than her head. To _know_.

At least the pain in her arm has dulled with the rest of her senses. Painkillers and a compression bandage did the job. Curled up on the sofa with her laptop balanced precariously on her knees, she writes and writes until her thoughts are concrete.

_ Things I Know About Michael:_

  1. _Its human illusion is oddly detailed, esp. compared to that of the Stranger. (See: the biro smudge; the winter coat; the chapped lips & general lively complexion; the southern accent & other traits of voice. It also appears to be consistently right-handed.) It’s very convincing. Too convincing?_
  2. _Its abilities/risk factors include: looking human despite having a messed-up reflection; a source for finding out information it shouldn’t know (e.g. my address); being annoyingly cryptic (okay that’s not important but I’m listing it); very sharp fingers; summoning impossible doors. Its laugh makes my head hurt._
  3. _It has shown repeated interest in keeping me alive, despite its claims of indifference. (Perhaps its offer of friendship was personal after all.)_
  4. _It's kind, or at least, it wants me to perceive it as such. (It carried my shopping; talked me through a panic attack (how did it know what to do?); waited with me the whole 6 hours I was stuck in A &E, then magicked me a door back home.) Motive unclear. Trick?_
  5. _It left me that message on the fridge – ‘Don’t let them take you alive.’ Who is “them”? Why did it feel the need to sneak me the message & not tell me up front? Can it be honest with me? What could be stopping it? Its nature? An external threat?_



She stops writing, this new thought sticking in her mind like a thorn. Michael must have registered her curiosity by now. If it wanted to elude her, then surely it wouldn’t keep coming back. (Not unless her life depended on it, anyway. _Definitely_ not just to carry her groceries.)

And yet – it had.

Did it _want_ her to study it? To unpick the snarls of whatever it was? Could that be why it kept coming back? It seemed to fit with what she’d seen, though that could be wishful thinking on her part. She would certainly feel better with a solid explanation. She would also feel better going forward if she knew she had the creature’s blessing. (Though – at this point – she doubts there is a single warning strong enough to keep her from investigating further, even in the face of its wrath.)

* * *

Jon answers her email before she falls asleep. What he’s doing up at 3am, she has no idea, though she isn’t as surprised as she could be. Jon never looks like he sleeps well. The email reads:

_Thank you, Sasha. I’m putting you on sick leave until further notice; don’t come back before you’re ready. In the meantime I will_ not _be assigning you any work. What happened? Are you sure it was just a mugging? I know it’s only been a couple of weeks since you saw the Distortion. It hasn’t come back?_

_Rest up._

_\- Jon_

Sasha feels guilty for lying to him – especially when he’d been so good about it, before – but she can’t help thinking that, whatever Michael wants, it would prefer for the Archivist not to be involved. After all, it came to _her,_ not Jon. She mustn’t presume to know its mind just yet; any small decision it makes could be important.

She doesn’t tell Tim or Martin, either, though a part of her would like to. Martin sends her a lovely email the next morning, offering to pick up her open cases; an offer she politely declines. Tim insists on bringing her groceries for the week, citing her damaged arm as a reason she can’t do it herself, though they both know full-well that she could order online. “My hero,” she calls him, jokingly, and he smirks and flexes his biceps like a dumbass.

Michael keeps its distance.

She wonders why, all the while suspecting that – when it comes to the Distortion – _why_ is not the smartest question to ask.

* * *

It takes a week and a half for Sasha to lose her battle with the urge to return to the Archives. By this point, she has amassed a folder on Michael. (Starting a new research project always cheers her up, and she needed cheering up when she realised that she’d lost two of her ring binders that night in Finsbury Park. She didn’t pick them up before she walked through Michael’s door, and when she went back to look for them the following afternoon, they were gone.)

The new folder isn’t thick; not yet. It contains only her list, two digitised case files she found in the Archives’ online database which kind-of fit the Distortion’s MO, and a few hesitant theories on its origin:

_Theory #1: Spontaneous generation. Michael 'manifested', for lack of a better term, from a high concentration of human confusion and fear. Will be hard to verify this._

_Theory #2: It is someone’s discarded imaginary friend, gone feral or something. (Too fanciful?) Also hard to verify._

_Theory #3: It used to be a human, hence the odd level of detail in its form. Something awful (?) happened to make it whatever it is now._

_Theory #4: Michael isn’t anything, actually, and I've been hallucinating this whole time. I stabbed myself in Finsbury Park and fabricated the circumstances. (Note: will need to check w. landlord for carbon monoxide leaks in my building which could explain this.)_

The first two theories are unconfirmable – or at least, they will be maddeningly difficult to verify – and the fourth theory is _not_ something she's eager to confront. Thus, it’s with Theory #3 that she marches back to the Institute, planning to take full advantage of the resources on site.

She has other work to prioritise, of course. Jon hadn’t wanted to tax her while she was recovering, so cases have begun to stack up in her absence. It looks like her perusal of the un-digitised statements will have to wait. As she runs through all her usual online checks, she keeps the UK Missing Persons database open in a background tab. When she has a spare minute, she runs a search, scanning for everyone named Michael who has disappeared in the last ten years.

Of course, the search parameters are far too wide to be of any use. She refines them with a few key details. First, its hair colour, which cuts out a considerable number of Michaels. Next, its age, which she approximates to be somewhere between 25 and 35. That rules out more Michaels, but there are still too many and none of them are right. Tenuously, she guesses at his accent, narrowing the search to encompass only those born in the South of England.

Still nothing.

By four o’clock, Sasha has exhausted her leads. She pushes back from the desk and puffs a heavy sigh. Michael is just too common a name.

* * *

Tim insists on walking her home. It’s the least he can do, he says, if she refuses to leave work until silly o’clock in the evening despite what happened last time. The two of them grab some falafel on the way back, and he doesn’t question it when she informs him that she'd like to take a different tube route home.

When Sasha places the key the lock, she knows something is off.

There isn’t anything _wrong_ with the place, exactly. All of her belongings are exactly where she left them: her cereal bowl in the sink; her books crammed messily into their shelves; her laptop askew on the coffee table.

But there's the faintest feeling of static in the air, enough to make the hairs on her forearms rise. Tim shivers when he steps inside. “Is something broken in here?”

“No,” says Sasha, absently. “I don’t think so.”

Her eyes have snagged on something else.

Her ring binders, waiting on the kitchen counter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is shorter than the others, but that’s because I wasn’t 100% sure how keen people would be on my deep-dive into the joys of library science. (Honestly, it’s not the deepest dive I could’ve done, but I didn’t want to get too technical about it. Especially not since it’s canon that most of the archival staff at the Institute don’t know their Dewey decimals from their assigned indexing.)  
> No Michael in this chapter, unless you count the references, but he will return for chapter four! (I feel bad for Sasha, looking for him on the missing persons’ database. Unfortunately for her, he isn’t on there – because he’s legally dead.)  
> As always, please let me know what you think and whether there’s anything you’d like to see specifically in future. :)


	4. Seven Doors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha's research begins paying off, but not without some nasty side-effects.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m back! This chapter is longer than the others – and it was much trickier to write – so I took some extra time to try and do it justice.
> 
> The concept of Sasha with mild Beholding powers has really been gnawing at me, so I’ve started to incorporate that into the narrative. (If Gerry can Behold without being the Archivist, then hey, why can’t she?)
> 
> Content Warning for this chapter: Elias. Sorry. He’s only there for a minute.

It left notes in her folders.

Sasha doesn’t notice them at first.

Initially, she’s too busy looking through the new cases Jon has given her. The ones in her ring binders are years old – less urgent – so she doesn’t feel too guilty about setting them aside. When she returns to them at last, on the Thursday of her first week back at the Institute, it’s with fresher eyes. She glances over her old notes – the bullet-pointed lists of all the things she has to follow up on – and it’s then that she registers the extra sheaves of paper crammed behind them.

In a haze of weariness and perhaps too much coffee, her eyes slide across the pages as though they belong there. As though she wrote them in her own hand and simply forgot that they existed. It isn’t her hand, though. That much becomes clear when she withdraws them to examine. This script is smaller, tighter, with barely-there gaps between each word, as if the writer were afraid to take up too much space. And the words don’t stay flat on the lines. The longer she stares, the more they seem to writhe under her gaze; to curl in on themselves and twist into illegible scrawl, like ants in a spiral of death. When she blinks, they are normal words again. Until she tries to read more than a sentence, and the coiling begins anew.

It can’t have been anyone but Michael.

For starters, no-one else could have returned the ring binders to her flat. She keeps her name and mobile number inside the covers, but no-one has called her about them, and it’s ridiculous to imagine someone choosing instead to track down her address and jump all the legal hoops to get hold of her front door key. No. Michael must’ve taken the ring binders, secreted them away for a week, and – once it finished its perusal – dumped them on her counter for her to find. The spiralling handwriting is all the confirmation she needs.

Sasha expects the paper to tingle when she touches it, but it just feels like paper. Loose, lined leaves of A4, carefully removed from a spiral-bound book. She brews herself a fresh cup of coffee before she can bring herself to read them.

When she does, much to her surprise, she finds that they are _case notes_.

* * *

Michael writes the way it talks: like a sixth-form student’s first foray into literary fiction. All unnecessary metaphors, tangents and verbiage. Reading through its observations – especially when she can only parse them one line at a time – takes hours. Typing them up into a readable font takes longer. Then she has to _decipher_ them, which… well, it would be quicker not to bother.

Except that she can’t. Because when she goes to make her own enquiries – to follow up with all the statement-givers and assorted witnesses – she finds each and every one of them missing. The dates of their disappearance span the week she spent at home, recovering from her injured shoulder.

Sasha cries a little, when she realises what must have happened. Stands discreetly from her desk, tucking her chair in behind her, makes her way without a fanfare to the ladies’ lavatory and holds a hand over her mouth so that no-one hears the sobs.

Michael took seven lives last week.

Seven lives, for _her_.

* * *

She had known, of course, that Michael was a monster. She had read two case files on its behaviour, both of which described in painful detail the statement-givers’ descent into madness. Neither man had been alive to give a follow-up when, a few years later, the files were finally made digital.

But this is different. This time, its atrocities are personal.

What she doesn’t understand – and what she knows, she _knows_ is a pointless question to ask – is _why_. Why had it felt the need to take the witnesses? Had it wanted her to rely on its testimony alone? (Because, even as she sits at her desk and – numbly, mechanically – translates every word into a semi-coherent timeline of events, she knows its notes cannot be trusted. They are secondary sources from an almost comically unreliable narrator. At best, there might not be a single grain of truth within them. At worst, it might be misleading the Institute on purpose; spinning lies to cover a truth it doesn’t want found.)

Why had it wanted to work on her cases at all? Had it genuinely been trying to help her, she wonders, or is this all just a horrible game?

Whatever the answer, she knows resolutely that she wants no hand in it.

Except for the inquisitive voice in the back of her mind which sees all of the horror and intreats her to keep digging.

* * *

It’s the sight of Elias in the break room that clicks it all into place. Sasha doesn’t even know why. The thought just hits her, as he is stirring his coffee, the metal teaspoon clinking against the rim of a novelty mug. (The mug reads, ‘ _I don’t need Google: My boss knows everything!_ ’, and Elias had laughed more heartily than Sasha had ever heard him when he unwrapped it last Christmas. Tim had bought it, she thinks; or perhaps it had been Martin. She still isn’t sure what made it funny enough to laugh at out loud.) He rarely comes down to take his coffee in the Archives, though he will, on occasion, show his face just to remind them he exists.

“Elias,” she asks, faux-casual, leaning her elbows on the counter. It’s sticky with spilled granules of sugar, but she doesn’t dare to move once she’s settled there. Anticipation is a living thing under her skin, humming impatiently as she prepares her question.

Elias turns to face her, dropping his spoon into the sink. “Yes, Sasha?”

“Did the Institute ever employ someone named Michael?”

There’s a pause as he thinks about it. “That’s a very common name.”

“I know.”

“I expect,” he says, dismissively, “that we’ve had dozens of Michaels over the years.”

“This one was blond,” she clarifies. “He worked in the Archives – an assistant, I think.”

She knows it’s true the moment she says it aloud. Knows it fundamentally, like basic mathematics, except for the fact that she _can’t_ know it. Elias gives her a long, dissecting look before he replies. Her skin prickles under the weight of his narrowed, steely gaze, and she finds herself thinking of scalpels. “Yes,” he says, eventually, and there’s a veneer of off-handedness to the words that rings entirely false. “Yes, I remember him now. Michael Shelley.” He steps around her, heading for the door. “Why do you ask?”

“I think I ran into him recently,” she says, not meaning to be honest.

“Ah. Well, I’m afraid that’s quite impossible. Michael Shelley is dead.”

He’s out the door before she can ask him anything else.

* * *

Sasha spends the rest of the morning chewing over what she’s learned.

_Michael Shelley_ , she repeats inside her head, with no idea what to make of the name. _Before it was Michael, it was a human whose name was Michael Shelley._

Now that she has a surname to work with, it’s easy enough to find out more about him. There's a necrology of Institute employees, which she had never cared to look at before, though – when she clicks it open – she sees with a jolt that it's perilously long. Michael’s name is the second-most recent on the list, followed only by Emma Harvey. Beside it, his position: archival assistant.

The same position she holds now.

Sasha feels sick when she realises what it means: _she was hired to replace him_.

Gertrude had never said anything about her previous hires. Sasha had assumed them to have left; moved on when the job had given them everything it could offer. But this would explain why Michael has spent so much time following her, she supposes. Perhaps the part of it that’s still Michael Shelley – if there is one – is curious about its successor. Perhaps it’s _nostalgic_.

Or perhaps it doesn’t want to be here at all. Perhaps this… this _haunting_ of its former position… is entirely involuntary. (Perhaps it’s up to her to exorcise him.)

The notes it took on her open cases were borderline incomprehensible, but – oddly enough – they followed the same order of steps that all assistants are advised to take when investigating something. In hindsight, it should’ve been obvious to her that the monster had done this before.

Sasha still doesn’t quite understand how she made the leap from _it could’ve been human_ to _it_ was _human, and it worked in the Archives_ , but she supposes that, subliminally, she must’ve recognised its research process.

There are pictures of Michael Shelley, too, when she digs for them. Not many, but enough to kill her lingering doubt. The first looks like an employee ID, taken against the same discoloured wall hers had been, with the same unflattering yellow light overhead. Awkward and forced. The next looks like it might’ve been taken by a friend. His smile is shier here, less comfortable on his face than she had expected it to be; he is mid-laugh as he pushes a loose curl out of his eyes. (The heel of his hand, she can’t help but notice, is stained dark with ink.) The taker of the photograph had caught him when he wasn’t looking, in a candid moment, and he looks _nice_. Sasha can imagine him in the break room, chattering blithely as he makes everyone tea.

This was the man who crossed the street to save her from the Stranger.

A lump forms in her throat. She stabs the X on the search window hard enough to hurt her fingertip.

* * *

Rosie is filing her nails at the reception desk when Sasha finds her.

It’s a last-ditch resort, but she needs more. More than the photographs; more than the pathetically sparse obituary. Shelley didn’t have a strong presence on social media, nor did he appear to have any easily-reachable friends. Rosie is the only one of her co-workers who might’ve met him, and might be willing to talk about it. (After their clipped words in the break room, she doesn’t dare return to ask Elias.)

“Oh,” Rosie greets her, dropping the nail file on her keyboard. “Sasha, sweetheart. How’s the shoulder?”

“Just fine, Rosie, thank you for asking. Can I have a word?”

Rosie, as it turns out, is the perfect person to ask. Over the next hour, Sasha learns more about Michael Shelley than she could’ve hoped to learn anywhere else. All the details that never made their way onto official records, she can recite without a second thought.

He was a hard worker, apparently, like Sasha herself. Always here an hour sooner than he had to be, and always one of the last out the door. He liked languages; they were his strongest skill. Always had his thumb in a dictionary. That was why they chose him for so many trips, Rosie thought; he was a useful translator.

The old Archive staff would nominate someone for coffee runs most mornings, and when it was his turn, he would always stop by the front desk and ask Rosie what she wanted. It struck her because no-one else had thought to take her order.

Rosie’s eyes turn misty and she dabs at them with a tissue when she gets to the part about her divorce. Apparently, Michael had been the only one to check in on her afterwards. He’d found her crying in the street nearby – the quiet spot she went to take her smoke breaks – and had brought her back to the break room in the Archives for a cup of tea, even though he must have been busy. She had wound up telling him all about the proceedings, and he’d listened like he genuinely cared, which was more than she could’ve said for the other employees at the time.

She almost can’t get the words out when she reaches the part where Michael died.

“Too young,” she stutters, and one of the tears escapes her eye, tracing a pale line through her foundation. “He was too young. I always told him he should spend more time out in the world, away from the Archives… I thought it would be good for him. I never thought…”

Sasha isn’t sure she wants to know, but she asks anyway: “What happened?”

Rosie shakes her head. “I don’t know. Gertrude never shared the details. There was an accident, I suppose. A horrible accident. The funeral was – I don’t think they recovered his body.”

Her words disintegrate into sobs and Sasha lays a hand on her shoulder, feeling guilty for bringing it up. She makes a mental note to chat with Rosie more often in future before she takes her leave.

* * *

Back at her desk, trying in vain to make a start on today’s newest assignment, Sasha finds that – try as she might – she can’t stop thinking about that final trip. _Zemlya Sannikova_. Gertrude had clearly lied about the destination. It takes but a quick Google search to realise the name came from a ‘70s movie and is not, in fact, a real place.

Gertrude had always been a strange woman. Sasha had never thought her a cruel one. Fear and hope war within her as she considers the string of events that led to her predecessor’s death. Hope that Gertrude hadn’t meant for it. Fear that she had.

If she shuts her eyes, she thinks that she can _see_ that cursed expedition. A boat bobbing on desolate water; cold grey waves slapping mournfully against a greyer, colder hull. The bell at the vessel’s masthead ringing out a death knell, set at odd intervals against the periodic red flashes of the mainmast light. ( _It looks like blood_ , she thinks, and then, _don’t think about that_.) At the prow, Michael would’ve waited, leaning his elbows on the gunwale, staring bleakly out into that abyss. Had he known what was coming? Had he known?

Sasha snaps back to reality when her computer monitor is shoved aside. The display shivers and breaks in a rainbow of pixels; the speakers let out an unhappy squeal.

“I do _not_ _appreciate_ being _Beheld_ , Sasha.”

Michael is towering over her desk. In the almost-fortnight since she last saw it, she had forgotten its height. Now, she gulps and shrinks back in her chair. “Beheld? What?”

It scowls at her, really scowls, and Sasha realises she’s never seen it angry. The last time she had been in its presence, it had been helping her into her flat, through that strange yellow door that looked as though it could’ve led into a linen closet. Its hand on her shoulder had been gentle, its voice more so when it asked how her arm felt. She had spent six hours in its company, which – even knowing it to be the _cause_ of the pain in her arm – was apparently more than enough time to forget how to fear it.

“You don’t know,” it says now, and it laughs viciously; a sound which echoes in the small square room. A smell like melted batteries fills the air. Her monitor has begun to smoke. “You don’t know you’re doing it, do you? Oh, that’s priceless.”

“What’s the matter?” she says indignantly. “I thought you wanted me to find you.”

“Not like _this_.”

Quickly, Sasha glances left, towards the office door. Tim is out, thank goodness. Buying them fancy salad bowls for lunch, as a treat. But Martin is in the break room, making tea; he’ll be back any minute now. If this is the moment Michael turns on her, she really doesn’t want her friends in range.

She leans back in her chair, hoping that if she provokes it, it'll grant her the favour of a quick demise and leave before anyone else gets caught in the crossfire. “Well,” she starts. “Funnily enough, _I_ don’t like it when _you_ steal my case files and _kill all of my witnesses_.”

Michael blinks at her like an owl. “What?”

“I don’t know what you were playing at,” she scolds it. “Much as I appreciate the return of my binders, it means _precious_ little when all of the material inside them has been rendered useless.”

“I was – trying to help.”

It actually sounds a little sheepish.

Sasha barks a laugh, inwardly shocked at her daring. “ _Help_? Have you forgotten how primary sources work? I needed those people!”

Michael recoils at her words, stepping back from the desk. Now that it is no longer looming over her, she cannot find it within herself to be afraid. It looks stupidly dazed, like a child whose pet dog just turned around and bit it. Like it had thought her _tame_.

Sasha keeps going. _Kill me_ , she thinks recklessly. _Now,_ _before Martin gets back_.

“Really, Michael,” she berates it. “I thought this used to be your job. Rosie told me you were good at it. If that were true, then surely you would’ve known better than this.”

The air around her bristles with static. Sasha waits for the lightning to strike; for one of those hands to slash across her throat.

What happens instead is worse.

“Fine,” Michael snarls. “Have it your way.”

All at once, seven doors burst open around the office. Seven individuals stumble out, each of them written all over with trauma. Three are crying; two have bloody knuckles like they’ve been hammering fruitlessly for hours on the doors. One of them trips on his way over the threshold and drops into a dead faint on the Archive floor.

The one closest to Sasha’s desk – a haggard woman in a once-lovely polka-dotted blouse – screams when she sees Michael. She turns to run – back the way she came, and oh, how Sasha wants to scream past the bubble in her throat and stop her – but before she gets too far, Michael grabs her by the elbow and yanks her roughly out.

“Don’t be stupid,” it tells her, its voice laced tight with anger.

It slams the door on its way out, and the slamming echoes sevenfold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! (And as always, please let me know what you thought and what you’d like to see in future.) I’m really excited to start writing the next chapter, which (I hope) will iron out the mess that is their current dynamic.
> 
> (Also, did Michael just slip up and admit that it /had/ wanted Sasha to find out more about it? Maybe.)


	5. Coffee House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha doesn't like the way they left things. Neither does Michael.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A slower update this time because there’s a lot going on in my personal life right now. I won’t get into it here, but thank you for your patience; just know that reading all your lovely comments has really helped to keep my spirits up!  
> This one, I hope, should make up for the little row they had in the last chapter.

Sasha wakes early on Saturday morning – so early it’s still, more or less, the middle of the night – with a messy song of hope and doubt playing loops in her heart.

Friday was a long and laborious day, full of paperwork and difficult phone calls in the aftermath of Michael’s stunt. (That’s without even getting into Thursday, and the _direct_ aftermath of what happened.) Hours spent on her feet should’ve let her fall into bed exhausted, but her mind would not stop spinning, and now that she’s awake, it’s quick to start again. She lies in bed and stares up through the open blinds until the stars wink out and orange light begins to bleed around the edges of the buildings on the far side of the street. By the time the sun is up proper, she is dressed and walking down said street, bound for the tube station.

Sasha wouldn’t call her decision a _plan_ , but there's a sharp, bright rhythm to her footfalls on the pavement; a brisk swing to her arms. There is purpose.

* * *

The tube ride is as grim and noisy as always, fuggy with that rancid-butter smell that seems to percolate in all the underground stops, though there is – thankfully – less commuter traffic to contend with on the weekends. Sasha puts her earbuds in, to discourage conversation, but she’s too jumpy to listen to her music. (Which is ridiculous, she thinks, because so far, none of the monsters who've caught her have been loud in their approach.)

She emerges at Victoria Station and starts in the direction of the Institute, though today, it is not where she is headed. Her actual destination appears before her far sooner than she would like. It's a coffee house: plain, simple, and pricey in the way all central London coffee houses are.

As she hesitates on the street outside, the door swings open and shut with traffic, and she catches wafts of sugar and roasting beans on the air; snatches of chatter and the grating whir of machines. She has never bought a coffee from here. Never been in here at all, but once.

Once, not quite a month ago, when she came in to sit down with a monster.

* * *

Michael is not waiting for her in the coffee shop today. To expect it would be ridiculous, given how their last encounter ended, but Sasha can’t help giving the place a quick once-over nonetheless, and a strange disappointment settles in her chest at its absence.

As she stands in the queue, she finds herself wondering whether Michael Shelley ever frequented this place. What might he have ordered, if he had? Did he mind the London coffee prices enough to make his own drinks in a flask before work, as she herself did on occasion? Or had he always been in too much of a rush? Sasha stops herself before she can take the thought further, afraid she might slip into ‘beholding’ again, whatever that means. Luckily, in the time she's spent inside her head, she's reached the front of the queue.

She orders herself a large mug of black cinnamon coffee and, before she can chicken out, another. Then, trying not to let the dark liquid slop out onto the lino, she carries the drinks to the same table Michael had waited at, what feels like a lifetime ago. She sits where she had sat that day, across from its vacant chair, and sets the coffees down at either end of the table. She hopes it doesn’t miss the invitation.

Part of her knows, of course, that this is folly. Why Michael – why _anyone_ – would want to talk to her after the way she addressed it in the office, she doesn’t know. Nor does she know why she’s so eager for its company, after what it did to the poor people in its halls. (Remembering the haunted looks in their eyes is enough to make her shiver, even on this bright spring day. She hadn’t stuck around to hear their statements as Jon took them, but the stories glowed from inside of them like neon: she could read what happened in the wrinkles of their frowns; the tremor of their hands as they drank the tea Martin had made.)

She tells herself she's only here for the sake of her safety. This is a courtesy, a placation, to smooth over Michael’s ire before it can do worse. It’s safer to stay on the thing’s good side than it is to make an enemy of it.

The truth is simpler and worse: she would’ve felt wrong, leaving things to fester.

There’s also curiosity. Sasha still has so many unanswered questions, and while Michael hasn’t exactly been a font of forthcoming answers, it has taught her more than she has learned anywhere else. (In less than a month, it has taught her its own nature, which she has learned – if not to understand – then to approximate through observation; it has taught her about the Stranger; about monsters’ habits of leaving marks. And, perhaps most importantly, it has shown her that the Institute is not as safe as she’d once thought.)

There is more to be learned from its acquaintance; that much is certain. If she keeps it close, she thinks, she can learn more.

And oh, how badly she would like to learn more.

* * *

The morning passes. Retail workers, pre-shift, duck in for their morning takeaway orders, and are swiftly superseded by a stream of families out shopping, resting their legs. Sasha drains her coffee; orders another. Michael’s sits untouched.

A porcelain mug, Sasha thinks, has never looked so damning.

Lunchtime hits and young couples filter in for coffee dates, followed at once by another rush of retail staff. Sasha sits in silence and watches them go by, wondering how long it'll take for Michael to appear. Whether it even will.

While she waits, she mulls over the questions in her mind. There are so many. _What is ‘beholding’? How did I do it? Why did it make Michael so angry? How angry_ was _it – have I seen it at its worst, or could it pose a greater danger still? If it doesn’t kill them straight away, what does it do with the people in its corridors? Do they stay in there forever? If there’s a shred of its humanity left inside it, could I persuade it to let more of them out? And what, exactly, happened to Michael Shelley on that trip to Sannikov Land?_

She could, she knows, try and distract herself. There’s a book in her satchel, and – failing that – there are plenty of apps on her phone. She probably _should_. It would make the hours fly quicker – would earn her far less puzzled stares – but giving in to the need for entertainment would feel like cheating, somehow. Michael spent a full day waiting for her with nothing but that sad bouquet of lilies, and – unless it can be in multiple places at once, which Sasha isn’t sure she’d like to think about – she doubts it did anything to fill the time.

* * *

As closing time draws near, she considers giving up. Caffeine has upped the dial on her anxiety; left her almost too jittery to grip the handle of her mug. She switched from coffee to tea at midday, and from tea to hot chocolate at four, but it hasn’t helped.

Under the table, her knee jogs up and down, up and down. What was she thinking? That she would sit the monster down for coffee and everything would be okay? If it _does_ show up, it will no doubt still be mad at her. It’s best she leaves now, before it has the chance to pounce.

Of course, the moment the thought crosses her mind, she lifts her head and there it is, seated calmly across from her.

It folds its hands on the table and smiles its blandly-pleasant smile. “Good evening, Sasha. I’m not imposing, am I?”

Sasha regards it quizzically for a moment. She didn’t see it come in. She never does. “Imposing?”

“Yes. I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk to you. I would have sat down earlier, but it looked as though you were expecting someone, so I kept myself to one side in the hope that I might catch you afterwards. Only…” it gestures at the untouched mug, now long-cold. “It doesn’t look like anyone is coming.”

Sasha puts her head in her hands and groans.

“Is something wrong?”

She answers through the lattice of her fingers: “The coffee was for _you_ , you moron.”

“What?”

When she lifts her head, she finds it utterly motionless, like a character on a paused movie screen. It doesn’t breathe, nor does it blink, nor does it shift its gaze from hers. Exasperation wells in her lungs where fear once would’ve lived. “I’ve been sitting here all day waiting for you to show up. This is where we met before, is it not? I thought you’d get the hint.”

Michael blinks its slow, inhuman blink before its lips begin to curl up in a smile. The small smile, the real one. “You wanted to see me?”

“Yes. I wanted to apologise.”

“Whatever for?”

Sasha stares at it until she’s certain it’s not messing with her. The look in its eyes is far nearer to puzzlement than the smug, gloating look of someone who wants to hear her grovel.

“I hurt your feelings,” she says, slowly and seriously, the way she might explain a maths problem to a child. When its expression doesn’t change, she continues. “At least, I think I did. You didn’t like it when I _b_ _eheld_ you, whatever that means. And then I shouted at you. Which you did deserve, but I still felt mean about it.”

“Funny,” it says, with a laugh in its breath. “ _I_ came to apologise to _you_.”

“You did?”

“Yes.” It straightens in its chair and clears its throat, which doesn’t sound quite the way it should, but Sasha knows better than to linger on the wrongness of it. “I am sorry for causing such a stir while you were at work,” it says. “I’m not in the habit of slamming my doors. It was rude of me. And – more importantly – I’m sorry for stealing your witnesses. I hadn’t realised they were so important to you.”

Sasha doesn’t know how to explain that _all_ human life is important to her, but as far as apologies go, this is more than she’d expected. Then again, she'd never expected it to apologise for _anything_ , really. (Can a monster truly regret its actions? Can it repent, when all it has done is bow to its own nature?) She flashes back to the first time they sat here, her reflection and its distortion painted on the window-glass against the darkened streets outside. She had told it to stop speaking to her in riddles, or she would leave. It had apologised then. Perhaps she ought to give it more credit.

“Of course, I refuse to _starve_ myself for your appeasement,” it continues, “but I will refrain in future from taking anyone you need alive.”

“Thank you,” Sasha says, not sure how grateful she should be. Then, her mind snags on its phrasing. “Wait – _starve_ yourself? Are you _eating_ those people?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“So then, you rely on them for sustenance? Without them you would, what, die?”

“If you’re planning on testing the theory – though I’m not sure how you _would_ – I’d like to caution you against it. I get… _crueller_ , when I’m hungry. And besides, I doubt it would work. I would suffer for it, yes – I might be something else by the end – but there _are_ no means of permanently killing me. All it would take is one doubt, one _what if_ , and I would be anew.”

Sasha listens intently, which isn’t hard. Its speech has always had a languid quality, like honey dripping from a spoon. She focuses on catching the drops, the little bits of substance it may or may not mean to share. ( _I get crueller when I’m hungry_ , she repeats inside her head. A silent confession: it has tried to starve itself before. Why, she cannot guess, nor does she plan on asking. But she files the information away all the same.)

“Don’t worry,” she says, when it’s done speaking. “I don’t want to harm you.”

Only upon saying it aloud does she realise it’s true. Michael’s admission – that it is a sort of obligate carnivore; that it needs its victims in order to live; that it isn’t killing solely for the fun of it – soothes the guilt that's been eating at her insides. The guilt of knowing that, despite what it does – what it _is_ – she has begun to view it... fondly.

Michael nods. “I’m sure, by now, that it goes without saying, but the feeling is mutual.”

Inwardly, Sasha’s lungs deflate with relief. She should have guessed that Michael meant no harm when it saved her from the Stranger, but there had always been that nagging suspicion in the back of her mind; that fear that it was only saving her for its own purposes. With a deep breath, she leans in and takes its hand. “Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why don’t you want to harm me? Why have you been _protecting_ me?”

Michael doesn’t answer. Its hand feels wrong in hers – like twigs, this time; like reaching into a bird’s nest – but she can tell without looking when it shifts, palm-up, to grasp her hand in return. “Does there have to be a reason?” it asks.

Sasha takes that to mean it doesn’t want to tell her. Instead of pressing, she moves on. There are far more urgent matters to clear before this conversation can be allowed to end.

“Don’t eat any more of my witnesses,” she says. “If you’re planning on sticking to your word, these are the people I want you to avoid. My witnesses, my family, and my co-workers. That means Tim, Martin, Jon and Elias. And Rosie, of course.”

Michael snorts. “I wouldn’t be so quick to extend your protection to Elias if I were you.”

“What does that mean?”

“I couldn’t say.”

Not for the first time, Sasha wonders whether it is capable of speaking plainly. Sometimes it looks as though it wants to. Now is one of these times. It's forsaken eye contact for gazing into its coffee mug, and there’s a Y-shaped crease between its brows. After a long pause, it speaks again. “You have my promise. If a tragic end befalls them, it won’t be at my hand.”

Ominous, but acceptable. Sasha nods. “Thank you.”

Silence descends on the table, and it’s at this point that Sasha realises the café should have closed. Like last time, Michael’s presence seems to have cast an eerie spell upon it, keeping it open in its own timeless bubble. The barista who had been wiping tables now stands at the far wall, scrubbing the same four tiles over and over again. Another sits cross-legged on the counter, staring dolefully at the ceiling fan. The woman at the register is eating receipt paper like a fruit roll-up.

“I should go,” Sasha says quickly. “I don’t want to take the tube after dark.”

“Would you like a door?”

“No,” she says. “No, thank you.”

Michael looks disappointed.

“If you’re not busy, though,” she adds, “I’d appreciate some company on the walk.”

* * *

Michael walks her all the way back to her flat in Finsbury Park.

Sasha, as is her habit now, takes off her shoes at the building’s entrance and walks up the stairs in her socks. When they make it to her door, she surprises herself by inviting it inside.

“I would like that,” it says, but it doesn’t move to follow her in.

“But?” she prompts it. “What’s the catch?”

It sighs. “I returned your witnesses. I need to find some… others. To replace them with.”

A dark, unwelcome feeling pools in Sasha’s stomach. “You’re going out to hunt.”

“Yes.”

She wonders if she dares to voice the thought that flitters through her mind. But then, she figures – what is there to lose?

“Pick someone awful,” she says. “Someone the world won’t miss.”

“That will be difficult,” it answers. Sasha braces herself, expecting a spiel about morality – how it’s a social construct; how it’s meaningless; how human behaviour is too complex to stick into boxes labelled _evil_ and _good_ – but it must see the look on her face, because it sighs again and shrugs. “I can try.”

“Thank you.”

It hovers there a moment longer, like it’s waiting for something. Sasha knows that, the moment she bids it goodnight and shuts the door, it will be gone. She tries not to imagine it out there, stalking its victims through the darkened streets, peeling back their realities like the skin of a ripened fruit.

“Well, the offer’s open,” she says, a little wrong-footedly. Her hand doesn’t want to cede its grip on the door; isn’t ready to let it fall shut. “You’re welcome to visit again.”

Michael bows its head. “Until next time, then.”

“Until next time.”

She lets go of the door, then stops it with her foot. Michael inclines its head at her, asking a silent question. She answers by stepping forward and looping an arm around its neck.

It’s not a tight hug, nor is it a lingering one. But in the fleeting moment Sasha spends pressed close to it, sensations like time and distance cease to have much meaning. She feels its body tense up in surprise: it’s a flurry of bubbles in a carbonated drink; a mouse chewing through electrical wires. She feels it relent and it is frost-white breath and wind chimes. It doesn’t quite return the hug – perhaps it isn’t sure how – but its arms lift like it’s tempted. They dangle in empty space until she lets it go.

“Goodnight, Michael,” she says quickly.

“Goodnight, Sasha.”

She shuts the door without meeting its eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with me through another chapter! I hope you enjoy this one as much as I enjoyed writing it.  
> (The “I apologise for causing such a stir” line made me cackle when I reached it. It’s striking me now that Michael’s outburst in the previous chapter was more-or-less the monster equivalent of an angry ex-employee walking into the office of their replacement, smashing up their desktop, throwing up on the floor and storming out. Michael Shelley would be mortified.)  
> As always, feedback is very much appreciated! I’ve mostly figured out the trajectory for the remainder of this story, but for the time being I’m still open to suggestions if anyone has anything they’d particularly like to see!  
> (I’m also sitting on another multi-chapter idea – one that features Gerry, and actual, living Michael Shelley – but I don’t want to juggle two long works at once, so I’m letting it simmer while this one is in progress. Keep an eye out if you’re interested!)


	6. On Tape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha knows she shouldn't dig deeper, but she can't seem to help it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story actually has a plot now, which I’m excited to delve into! I’d say we’re probably at the midpoint, though I haven’t sketched out the chapters one-by-one yet.  
> Thank you for all the comments on chapter five; I really enjoyed writing their conversation (and have more chapters planned like it.) This chapter is another nerdy one, but you all responded well to that last time, so I hope you don’t mind!

It takes three weeks for Sasha to fully comprehend that she has made friends with a monster.

In those weeks, summer arrives, its sticky breath coating London in a miserable dew. With no air-con to speak of in her thick-walled Victorian building, Sasha contrives all manner of excuses to spend extra time down in the Archives, where she can take advantage of the climate-controlled storage space. She creates a new shelf for incidents related to the Stranger, and sets both Martin and Tim on the lookout for statements to add to it. She updates software and makes a list of hardware upgrades for Jon to consider when he does the Archive’s budget. It’s unfortunate, though, as more time spent in the Archives equals lower odds of running into Michael.

Sasha doesn’t know when she started viewing its absence as _unfortunate_. Only that she does. When it’s walking with her on the street, or riding with her on the tube, she feels safer. Michael is dangerous, but that danger is good: it's a danger that will fight to keep her out of harm’s way. When it’s browsing her apartment with that thoughtful, almost sentimental curiosity, it reminds her of a housecat. Alone in the dark, she feels vulnerable. Alone in her living room, she feels _watched_. (Michael watches her too, of course, but feeling watched is far less scary when you know exactly what is watching you.) She chases the thoughts away with work. A less troubling, but perhaps more pertinent question is why Michael hasn’t been back to her workplace since the incident with the seven doors.

It could be a matter of courtesy. It had been specific in its apology, not just for causing a scene but for causing a scene in her _office_ ; perhaps the last remaining shreds of Michael Shelley have imbued it with some lingering sense of professionalism. It could also be personal. She still doesn’t know Michael’s business with the Institute – what led it to become _distorted_ – and until she asks, she can't rule out a grudge against the place.

(Though that begs the further question: if it hates this place so much, why does it seem so loyal to _her_?)

When she runs out of odd jobs, Sasha – still reluctant to face the heat of late May – is forced to find a new way to pass the time. Jon is never short on jobs for the three of them, but she's a quick and conscientious worker, and she’s usually almost finished by the time she stops for lunch. (It helps that the process is so repetitive. For each statement, she whiles away the hours at her desk, deep-diving into social media pages and news articles surrounding the statements. Verifying all the facts; comparing them with Tim’s and Martin’s findings from the field; writing it all down. And that's all there is to it.)

She doesn’t _mean_ to add to her folder on Michael. She knows it doesn’t like being Beheld, and without knowing exactly what Beholding entails, she walks a fine line of doing it again by accident. The folder just… sort of… _grows_.

It starts when she’s sorting through a back room, trying to recreate some semblance of order in the stacks. Gertrude’s filing system – and the reasoning behind it, if there is any – has always eluded her, but she has found that, if she concentrates, certain boxes will call out to her like a siren’s song. When she follows the call, she finds things. Useful things.

She tries to keep her thoughts clear and unclouded, in the hopes that whatever she finds will be impartial. (Perhaps that’s the line between Beholding and not Beholding: letting her hands steer her and not her mind.) Nonetheless, within the span of a week, she finds that she has amassed a stack of tapes from Gertrude’s tenure, and a healthy sheaf of Manila folders, too.

They should be random. She _knows_ they should be random. But they’re not.

Their unifying theme: Michael Shelley.

* * *

Jon is busy with the tape recorder, so Sasha starts with the folders. It doesn’t take her long to realise whose work they contain. Michael’s handwriting is all over them, and those cramped, shy letters look even meeker in the margins of printed text. His primary job within the Archives had apparently been typing up foreign-language statements, then parsing out an English translation for Gertrude. Sasha remembers what Rosie said: _always had his thumb in a dictionary_.

There are several statements in French; two in Spanish; one in what Sasha guesses could possibly be Dutch. She winces when she sees one handwritten in Cyrillic, though she can’t tell by looking whether the language is Russian or something else, and Michael never got past the opening paragraph of his translation. It _could_ have been related to Sannikov Land, but it could just as easily have been a coincidence. (She really hopes it was a coincidence.)

There are crossings-out and question marks all over Michael’s notepaper; enough for Sasha to wonder at his fluency. Thanks to a mixture of lazy education secretaries and poorly-veiled cultural xenophobia, most British secondary schools’ language departments are shot to Hell. No-one goes through the schooling system and leaves it fluent in four languages. Sasha would be impressed if anyone left fluent in _one_. Did Michael really learn all these by himself? And if so, did he know the languages well enough to speak them, or did he translate purely with dictionaries and hope?

She stops herself before she can wonder about it too much. That invisible line is always there, like a tripwire; the line between innocent curiosity and Beholding. It’s hard to know when to hold herself back. To be safe, she grounds herself in evidence, and shakes off every speculative daydream that tries to pull at her thoughts.

This time, to distract herself, she ducks into a quiet room and puts on a tape.

* * *

There’s nothing unusual about it at first. Gertrude introduces herself concisely, almost brusquely, before launching into a horrifying tale. Sasha listens intently for details that might explain what compelled her to pluck the tape from its box, but almost twenty minutes pass and nothing jumps out. The tape is nearing its end when Sasha hears a knock on the door.

Reflexively, she glances behind her, to the doorway where she expects to see Tim or Martin waiting. No-one's there. On the recording, Gertrude’s grainy voice answers, “Yes?”

Sasha exhales and sits back. The door – to what was then Gertrude’s office, but is now Jon’s – creaks open. “Ms Robinson? Now isn’t a bad time, is it? I have some reports to go over with you, but I – I can come back. If you’re busy.”

At the sound of his voice, her whole body breaks out in goosebumps.

“No, Michael, now is fine. Let’s see them.”

A thud as the door closes behind him; a shuffling sound as he spreads what must be an array of papers over Gertrude’s desk. “Emma just got finished with these. She asked if I could run them past you – said they were urgent.”

“What are they?”

“They’re about that – that old man. Paul McKenzie? With the door in his room that keeps rattling at night. There wasn’t much to learn from the footage he gave us. Emma thinks it’s probably just dementia, but she said it might be good for us to send someone out there, to, uh, to investigate. And Sarah, well, Sarah said that—”

Sasha barely absorbs his words, feeling the whole time like someone just poured ice water down the back of her neck.

He hadn’t been real before. Not when she’d read his obituary; not when she’d seen the photographs, so still and unfamiliar on her desktop screen. Not even when she’d riffled through his files and seen the places where his pen had indented the page; the places where the heel of his hand once smudged the still-drying ink. His voice, though. His voice, so _almost_ the same as her Michael’s. _That_ 's real.

When she can’t take it anymore, she hits _stop_. The room falls into horrible silence.

She stashes the rest of the tapes in her drawer and leaves that evening without pressing play on a single one.

* * *

Michael is waiting for her in the stairwell that evening, by the window with its mottled glass. She sees it there before she even enters the building. A blurry smudge of blond, peering down at her like a strange guardian angel. She wonders what she must look like from its angle; how the glass must distort her body.

She feels guilty greeting it, knowing what she heard on the tapes, though if it’s aware of what she did, it doesn’t say so. Just takes her satchel from her shoulder and carries it the rest of the way up the stairs.

* * *

The next afternoon, once she’s emailed her newest work to Jon, Sasha braves the tapes again. There’s no use in letting them sit there, she decides; not if listening to them doesn’t count as Beholding. (And Michael would surely have complained, if it did.) It still feels uncomfortable, setting one into the recorder and knowing it contains the voice of a dead man (and a probably-dead woman, too, come to think of it.) But she has to know what’s on them. She can’t shake the feeling that it matters.

The remaining pile of tapes aren’t like the first one, and initially, they confuse her. Each one starts the same: with Gertrude stating the name of the subject, the topic of the statement and the date on which it was recorded. But then she will say, “Statement taken direct from subject.” She will cue the statement-giver to talk. And the voice on the tape will be Michael’s.

None of the statements are given by the same person. There's a maybe-haunted cottage in a village on the outskirts of Shrewsbury; an anglerfish-type creature stealing dog-walkers in Brockenhurst; an incident with a sketchy antiques dealer in Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard. The statement-givers themselves are all manner of people. Among them, a retired banker; a housewife with three teenage children; an interior design student who paints houses freelance for cash.

Sasha sits and listens to the tapes one by one, well past the end of her shift. Michael speaks for them all, in that glassy, trancelike voice all statement-givers use, as if he’s only distantly aware of what he’s saying. Sasha and Tim have remarked many times to each other that Jon’s statement-reading voice gives them the heebie-jeebies. Apparently the creepiness transcends the speaker.

Sasha feels stupid when she realises, at last, what Michael’s voice is doing on the tapes. Understanding hits when one statement-giver mentions her service animal, who wakes her up each morning in lieu of an alarm. The statement-givers are all using BSL, and Michael is translating for the record.

Tiredness drags at her eyelids. She puts the tapes away, deciding to save the final one for tomorrow. (When did she start thinking of documents as something to save, like a snack?)

When she makes it back to Finsbury Park, Michael’s silhouette isn’t waiting in the window. Disappointment curls in her chest like smoke: a candle of hope snuffed out.

She almost has a heart attack when she enters her flat and finds it sitting at the counter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To clarify: I know that the Archivist’s powers allow them to understand languages they never learned to speak, but I like to imagine Gertrude being somewhat reluctant to take advantage of such powers. If she had access to an overly-devoted assistant, who was willing to bend over backwards to fetch (and maybe create) translations for her, why wouldn’t she use that instead? Better than giving into the Eye.  
> (Also: I’m very grateful to have a chance to gripe about the British education system in this fic. To expand on what I mentioned earlier in the chapter, British language departments have a reputation for sucking. There’s a culture here of expecting everyone in Europe to know English, which leaves us too lazy and entitled to learn other people’s languages in turn. I try to counteract it myself by learning the basics before I go anywhere that speaks a different primary language, but it’s a nationwide flaw in our education system and I really hope it improves.)  
> As always, please let me know what you thought of this chapter and whether there’s anything you’d like to see in future!


	7. Past and Present

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Angst Has Arrived

Sasha jumps back against the doorframe and shouts. “Shitting _Hell_ , Michael!”

“A pleasure to see you, too.”

It takes all her willpower not to launch her shoes at it. 

She should, by all accounts, have seen this coming. This is the exact situation she had worried about when she first met Michael; the predictable penalty of befriending a literal sleep paralysis demon. The biggest surprise, really, is that it hasn’t happened _sooner_. And yet – and yet – she’s gotten used to its manners, its polite way of waiting for her invitation. She’s become so accustomed to letting it in herself that she’d forgotten there was nothing physically keeping it out. Irritation flares through her at her own sloppiness.

“Normally,” she grits out, “you wait on the stairs.”

“What is _normal_?”

“Oh, don’t start.” She throws her shoes down by the doormat and marches in to toss her satchel on the couch, paying it no mind as it follows her with its iridescent eyes. The careless movement helps to loosen her chest, though she can feel her heart still stuttering with leftover panic. “It’s been a busy day.”

“Has it, now.”

“Yes, it has,” she snips.

She turns her back on it to sort through her bag for her phone, her charger, and vows not to look over her shoulder. She does anyway, when it talks. She can’t help it.

“Tell me,” it says, and folds itself forward over the counter, resting its chin in its palms. Its sharp elbows look like they should cut through the worktop, but they don’t. “Tell me about your day.”

“You know what a day in the Archives looks like.”

“Tell me anyway.”

Michael’s posture, she notes for the first time, is awkward. It’s not the typical awkwardness of a monster made from metaphysical spaghetti, but the variety that’s borne of nerves. It doesn’t appear to be moving when she glances at it quickly, but when her gaze lingers, she sees that it is rocking in place, ever-so-slightly, from side to side. It reminds her of when her dog used to wag its tail, not out of joyful abandon but subtly, uneasily, between its legs.

Sasha gives up on her phone charger and straightens, rounding to face it properly. She almost can’t believe it, but now that she’s picked up on it, it’s impossible to ignore: Michael is _anxious_. She eyes the fridge, but it hasn’t left any magnet-messages. Is that a good sign?

“I came in half an hour early,” she starts, watching for a reaction. It watches back, with its habitual blankness. “Booted up all the systems,” she carries on. “Got a head-start on Jon’s assignment list, which he emailed us at something stupid like 5am. I refuse to believe he was in the Archives that early; I think he must’ve sent it from his bed.” She forces a chuckle here, which it doesn’t reciprocate. It blinks: once, twice. Sasha keeps talking. “The work was the usual. Missing person here, violent murder there. I retouched some photos taken on a flip phone in 2003. You can imagine how great those looked, before _and_ after.” Another weak attempt at comedy. Yet again, Michael doesn’t snicker, where Tim or Martin would’ve. (Where Michael Shelley would’ve.) Sasha gulps. She doesn’t know how much longer she can do this, this stare-down with a fake breezy smile glued to her face. “Tim got us pita breads for lunch. I went through some old boxes in the afternoon.”

This time, she stops, very deliberately. She decides not to continue until it gives a response. Seconds drag by like nails across a chalkboard. Eventually, it shifts itself on the barstool and asks, “What did you find?”

“Some tapes I had been looking for.”

“And?” it prompts her. “What had you been looking for?”

“Is this an interrogation?” Michael sits up straighter at her volume, dropping its hands to the countertop. She hadn’t meant to snap at it. She doesn’t mean to continue. “Is this – what, your way of trying to guilt me? Because you already know what I found, and you want me to say it?”

Michael’s expression doesn’t obviously change, but suddenly its features are arranged in a way that looks… _upset_. “I just wanted to talk about your day.”

Sasha swallows hard. Her heart is beating fiercely in her chest again. She feels mean for raising her voice, and worse for having looked through all those tapes. The pitiful look on its face isn’t helping. She sighs. Buries her face in her hands. She needs a moment of darkness before she can stomach looking at it again.

When she’s ready, she lifts her head. “Would you like some tea?”

It nods, and she sets about boiling the kettle.

* * *

Five minutes later, the two of them are sitting elbow-to-elbow at the counter, hot steam curling up from their two mugs. Sasha wraps her hands tightly around the painted ceramic, wanting something to steady her more than she wants the actual drink.

Beside her, Michael drums its nails against the countertop in an agitated rhythm. _Clack-clack-clack_. When Sasha tries to pick out the beat, she finds that it matches the theme song from a cartoon she watched as a child. The moment she recognises it – with a bloom of directionless nostalgia, as she finds herself unable to pin down the show’s title – the drumming begins to sound different, and suddenly it’s the bassline of a song she heard on the radio last week. Who sang it? The artist’s name is on the tip of her tongue when it shifts back into nothing, becomes noise, and then there’s a shooting pain above her eyebrow.

“Stop that,” she manages, gruffly.

Michael stops.

The silence starts to drag again in absence of the drumming, and she almost wishes it would carry on. “Michael,” she says.

“Yes?”

“What’s wrong?”

“With me?” When she nods her confirmation, a laugh spills out of it, hollow and false. “Everything, of course. It’s when something’s _right_ that you know I’m in trouble.”

“Really, though.” She nudges its elbow with hers, a soft bump that sends numbness reverberating up her arm. “Something’s weighing on you. I can see it. If we’re friends, then you can talk to me.”

It sighs. “I don’t want to talk. I don’t _like_ to talk. Words have a permanence that doesn’t befit me.”

“The tapes,” Sasha says. “You know I listened to them.”

“Yes.”

“Are you angry?”

“No. I can no more begrudge you your curiosity than you can begrudge me for confounding it. We all have our natures. I am a puzzle, and solving puzzles is what you do.”

It sounds – Sasha realises – hopelessly sad. Like it’s resigned itself to something it really doesn’t want. “I can stop,” she says. “If you don’t like it.”

“No, you can’t. The Eye has tightened its grip on you, now. You are bound to it far more deeply than I had thought when we first met. If I had known…” it gazes into her living room, but she can tell it isn’t looking at anything. The forever-ink-stained index finger of its right hand swirls around the rim of its mug. “No,” it decides at last. “I would still have found you.”

Sasha’s mind whirs as she processes its words.

_Why can’t I stop?_ she wants to ask. _What is the Eye?_

She doesn’t voice the questions, though. She’s scared of what that will mean. There was a horrible weight of doom in its voice when it told her. As if the two of them are hurtling forward into… what?

Nothing good. When she can’t fight the urge any more, she settles on a simple question, or what passes for _simple_ in a conversation with a monster over tea.

“How did you know I’d found the tapes? Were you spying on me?”

It clucks at her. “I don’t _spy_.”

“Then how?”

“I just knew,” it says. “I know you, Sasha James. Once you started getting curious, it was only a matter of time. And the look on your face last night informed me that our time is up.”

“Meaning?”

She asks it before she can hesitate, though she isn’t sure she wants to know. It’s hard to talk to Michael like this, sitting by its side instead of facing it; a curtain of blond ringlets hides its expression from her scrutiny.

“You solve puzzles,” it starts. “As I said before. And I may be a puzzle, but you are _never_ going to solve me. I’m not even sure I _have_ a solution, or an answer, or a – a centre, if you were to look at me as a maze.” It sounds solemn. “I wanted to be friends with you, before I realised what would happen. I thought there was no harm. I thought I could… keep you safe.”

“Am I in danger?”

“You _are_ danger,” it says. “To yourself. To me. Your curiosity is one that _ravages_.”

Sasha can’t help but flinch. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” says Michael, “that I owe you an apology. My presence in your life has only stoked your natural curiosity, and I fear it has driven you straight into the arms of the Ceaseless Watcher. We are oil and water now, Sasha James.”

“I don’t understand,” she says.

“And I was not designed to be understood.” It gets up then, pushing aside its undrunk mug of tea. The liquid has a film on it now, a rainbow skin, like spilled petrol. _Oil and water_ , Sasha repeats inside her head.

“Finish the tapes,” says Michael. “I know you have some left. You look… hungry.”

It disappears through its yellow door before she can ask it anything else.

* * *

The next morning, before she even glances at Jon’s email, Sasha has the last tape in her hands. Her fingers tremble as she fits it into the machine.

There is silence, at first. Silence, which gives way to a shuffling sound not unfamiliar to Sasha: the sound of someone sorting through folders. There’s a clatter as a box hits the floor; a hiss as files skid across it. A muffled grumble as hands grope for what they dropped. Gertrude’s grumble. Sasha would recognise it anywhere.

This shuffling goes on for several minutes; it’s unclear whether Gertrude knows that she is being observed. She groans and Sasha can picture her standing with a stack of heavy files in one arm; her free hand pressed against the small of her back, which complains at the movement. She straightens and begins shelving each file in a random, incorrect place.

Sasha blinks. She can’t _see_ what’s happening, and yet she knows, without having to see, that that’s what Gertrude is doing.

When she shuts her eyes, the image of it rises in her mind unbidden: the dingy storage room, scarcely touched for decades, with its narrow stacks and flickering, naked bulbs. Gertrude in her olive cardigan, grey hair pinned back with a cheap tortoiseshell clasp. Formidable, even like that. She clucks when she drops another file, but opts to kick it under the shelving unit instead of stooping to retrieve it.

Gertrude has almost finished unloading the files when the creak of a door interrupts her. A high-pitched whistling pools in Sasha’s ears, like tinnitus. Interference on the recording. Then, a voice, jarringly familiar.

“Ms Robinson.”

Michael – _Sasha’s_ Michael – appears at the end of the row of shelves with hands on hips, its tall frame swallowing Gertrude’s exit. Everything about it is the same as it was the day it first met her in the café, from the winter coat to the ink-smudges on its fingers to the swirling blond curls that seem to writhe when she looks at them for too long. If the Archivist turns to leave the other way, Sasha senses, she will only find herself facing it again.

She is trapped in the stacks.

Fear unfurls at the base of Sasha’s spine, crawling up along it like a vine along a trellis. She has never been afraid of Michael before. She _still isn’t_. This, she realises with a jolt, is not her fear.

Gertrude takes a moment to push her glasses up the bridge of her nose before answering, as though she isn’t ruffled, as though she doesn’t care. But Sasha can feel her pulse tripping underneath her skin. “Ah, Michael,” she says, levelly. “There you are. I had been wondering when you would show up.”

She doesn’t do it the grace of meeting its eye. That’s how it looks, anyway, as she slots another file onto the shelf. Sasha knows why Gertrude cannot bear to look. Michael doesn’t. It narrows its eyes indignantly; folds it arms over its chest. “You weren’t expecting him back.”

“No, I wasn’t,” she agrees. “But I was expecting something like you.”

“There is nothing like me.”

“Hm. Perhaps not. In any case, I had thought you might pay me a visit.”

“Then you know why I’m here.”

“I imagine,” Gertrude answers, “that you’re here to kill me.”

A terrible smile creeps over Michael’s face. “Yes, I am.”

Gertrude huffs. Sasha feels her steeling herself. Preparing for a gamble.

“Well, get on with it, then,” she says. “My _back_ is killing me already, so you might as well beat it to the punch.” She turns now, to face Michael, and splays her arms palm-up. Her hands look frail, the liver-spotted skin loose over bone. Sasha didn’t see her set the remaining folders down, but there they are: sticking crookedly from a nook beside her, like broken teeth. “Come on, Michael. Don’t make me walk over to you.”

Michael laughs. It echoes horribly in the concrete basement room. “ _You_ made _him_ walk, though, didn’t you? Three thousand miles, it took to get from here to there, and that was _before_ you took the boat to nowhere at all. Three thousand miles to his end.”

Gertrude folds her arms. “Don’t tell me you pity him.”

“I do not _feel_ pity.”

“Then why bring it up?”

“I simply wanted to see,” it says, “whether there was anything in that barren heart of yours worth _toying_ with.”

It steps closer as it talks. Sasha feels Gertrude’s calves tighten, fighting the urge to step back. The Archivist holds her ground. “I do not regret my actions,” she says. “Michael’s sacrifice was necessary to put a stop to your ritual. He did not die in vain.”

“He did not die _at all_ , Ms Robinson.”

Now – _now –_ Gertrude’s unease begins to show, in a crease between her brows; a deepening of the lines around her mouth. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” it says, “that _Michael_ is still here.” It gestures at itself, its deceptively human body. “We are the same being now.”

Sasha feels something bloom through Gertrude’s chest. At first it feels like defeat. Then, she realises, it’s _relief_. “I see,” she says, pushing up her glasses again. Revealing nothing. “This revenge is as much his as the Spiral’s, then.”

“That’s right.” It steps forward; stops just out of arm’s reach. “Do you want to know how it felt, Ms Robinson? To be unravelled and remade?”

“Not particularly, Michael.”

“But I think you do,” it persists. “You are the _Archivist_ , are you not? It’s your job to feed the Eye – and the Eye has _never_ heard a tale like this one.”

Gertrude’s own eye twitches. “You’re stalling.”

“What?”

“You’re _stalling_ , Michael. Aren’t you?”

All of a sudden, Michael has a peculiar look on its face. It sways on its feet, back and forth. “I’m not,” it says. Then, again, “I’m _not_.”

“In that case, hurry up.” Gertrude beckons. “I’m waiting.”

Sasha doesn’t breathe; neither does Gertrude. Before them, Michael is wavering, avoiding her eyes. Its hands begin to shake. “What did you do?”

Gertrude smiles. “I’m afraid you’ll have to elaborate.”

“What did you _do_?”

Its distress is palpable now. Shining in its eyes, wide and casting about, as if the answers are written in the stacks. Sasha doesn’t understand, except that she does. This is the gamble Gertrude bet her life upon – and she has _won_.

“ _I_ didn’t do anything, Michael,” she says, “except _need_ you.” The smile on her face curls deeper. “And you did very well. Right until the end. I had thought I might be asking too much of you, but you followed through magnificently.”

Michael shakes its head. “Stop talking.”

“I do miss your presence around the archives,” she says. “The place is… gloomier now. I must say it. But it’s far better this way, and I think you agree. Better for _you_ to be locked in there than for the world to be.”

With that, she lays a hand upon its arm. Squeezes, firmly.

Michael hangs its head and _sobs_.

“You must think me awfully manipulative,” she says. “I am sorry. I only did what I felt necessary. The Spiral is a vindictive thing, as you and I both know; I expected it would not take kindly to my disruption of its ritual. In order to keep myself from falling prey to its vengeance, I had to… take measures for my own protection.”

Michael lifts a trembling hand and lowers it. Only when it speaks does Sasha realise that it’s trembling with _rage_. “No,” it says. “No. This isn’t – this isn’t _fair_.”

“Nothing is fair in a game like this,” says Gertrude, and there’s something wistful in her voice before it hardens. “There are no rules. Which is why we must fight dirty.”

Michael lifts its head and Sasha sees that it is crying. Its tears sparkle like waterfall spray against its flushed-pink cheeks. “I _hate you_.”

“And you love me,” Gertrude finishes. “Whether you like it or not.”

There is a horrible clattering as files fly from their shelves. Sasha, at her desk, holds her ears. Papers whip past their bodies, slicing hard enough to cut. A whirlwind of history, betrayal, and at its centre that _damnable_ love. Sasha feels it course through Michael like she’s there in the room; like she’s closer still; like she’s in its body, which is not and never has been a body. She feels the way its fingers flex, desperate to tear and rend, and the way they cannot bear to. She feels its hatred, its horror at what it has become, and the longing within it for revenge against a woman it could never bring itself to betray, even now. It tears at itself instead, pulling itself into ribbons which knit themselves into new shapes while its illusory body remains unchanged. The pain whites out everything else, an echo of its becoming. And in that whiteness, Sasha Sees.

She sees its future, now long in the past. Sees it wandering, aimless, picking off its prey like a scavenger. The Missing Person posters, the whispers of hauntings in the community centre where the Insomniac Group gathers weekly for their plastic-chair-circle therapy. She sees it hungry, struggling, fighting its own nature because It Is Not What It Is, in that moment, wishes to be _anything_ but what it is. She watches from a distance as it tries and fails to be either/or, Michael or Shelley, never both.

She watches as, like pictures on a magic-lantern, its history unfolds in contradictions: in cruel, clipped words and proclamations; in wilted lilies placed with reluctant tenderness on the lap of a rotting corpse. It kneels there in the final frame, curled against the body, its cheek pressed against the mildewed scrap of cardigan covering what used to be a shoulder. It misses her and it hates that it misses her.

And then the maelstrom settles, and stills.

Gertrude clears her throat. “Thank you, Michael,” she says, gesturing to the wreckage of the filing room. “I had hoped you might do that. It would’ve taken _me_ several hours.”

Her heels clack on the concrete as she picks her way over the mess of newspaper cuttings and typewritten onionskin that sticks to it. Michael appears frozen, too stupefied to stop her. Over her shoulder, she calls to it: “I trust that you can see yourself out.”

She doesn’t look back.

Eventually, her footsteps recede. A door – the one that belongs there – swings open and shut. Michael is left alone in the filing room.

It sinks to the ground in the mouth of the stacks, draws its knees to its chin and _cries_.

“I will wait, Archivist,” it says tightly, between gulpy, gasping breaths. “I may not be able to kill you myself, but I will wait until you’re weak. I will find a chink in your armour. And I will _ruin you_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …this is probably the most angst-heavy chapter of this story I have planned, though I can’t promise anything. (Next chapter, at least, will hopefully hurt less.)  
> Thank you, as always, for your feedback and support – I love hearing what you think! I know this chapter took a little longer than usual, but it was an important one so I wanted to make sure it was just right.


	8. Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel the need to apologise for the last chapter's angst. I can't speak for the story overall, but this chapter - and the one that follows it - are going to be much lighter in tone, to make amends.
> 
> Also, this one is a tad short, but only because the next one is going to be LONG.
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

It takes Tim’s hand on her shoulder, shaking solidly, for Sasha to remember where she is.

“Sash?” he prompts, and the word tails upward at the end, worried. “Sash, what’s wrong?”

Sasha glances around at her surroundings. Nothing has changed, though there is a mug of tea at her elbow which hadn’t been there before, still steaming slightly. Martin hovers behind Tim, as if caught somewhere between two impulses: to comfort, or to back off and leave her alone. The clock on the wall says only twelve minutes have passed since she hit _play_ , but nothing is the same anymore.

The tape in the recorder has stopped. When did it stop? How long has she been sat here like this? Her cheeks are wet with tears. When she goes to answer Tim, she finds herself choking on them, blubbering out the words where she’d like to speak them clearly. “God. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m—”

“Wait here,” says Tim. “I’m telling Jon you’re not well, and then I’m taking you home.”

“No,” she blurts. “No, it’s too early. I’m fine, I can still work.”

“You’re not fine. You’re crying.”

“It’s just – I’m just pre-menstrual, alright?” she lies. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

The truth is that she really does want to go home. She can’t bear to be in this building, knowing what happened just a few rooms away. It must’ve been at least a year ago now, but Sasha was – she was _there_.

And it’s not just that. When she walks to the copier now, she can see Michael Shelley stood before it, diligently scanning papers with his head bowed. The scene is an old one – the flyers on the noticeboard behind him make it 2011 – but it’s so real she thinks she could reach out and touch him, if she dared enough to try. She could reach out and touch him, and he would startle and look up at her with those wide grey eyes.

She sees him in Artefact Storage, checking statements against the items mentioned in them. Long fingers spotty with ink, twirling his pen as he talks, then pausing to make notes in a spiral-bound pad. She sees him in the break room, washing up with his hair tied back to keep it from falling into the soapy water. She wonders which of the communal mugs might once have been his; which ones he might’ve been the one to drop and chip.

His ghost is everywhere, haunting her life.

* * *

She’s about to ask Tim and Martin how much of the tape they heard when Jon appears, his brows already knitting themselves into a frown. He’s dressed as primly as always, in a shirt and tie and slacks, but the look on his face is incongruous: the look of a teenager who just woke up after missing his alarm. “What’s going on?”

Martin takes him by the elbow and explains the situation quietly. A new line appears on Jon’s forehead. A worry line.

“Sash…” Tim starts, and steals her attention swiftly back. “Look, you don’t have to tell me what it was. Not if you don’t want to. But I’d be a bad friend if I let you sit here and work looking like this. Let’s go get a coffee, I’ll pay, and once you’ve calmed down a bit, you can decide whether you’d like to go home or come back in. Deal?”

Sasha’s heart melts a little bit. She doesn’t want to show it, though. “And what’s _your_ excuse for skiving?” she asks, raising her eyebrows, though beneath them, her eyelashes are still spiky with tears.

Tim cracks a relieved grin. “I’ll take the consequences as they come. Like a knight falling in battle!”

She wishes she could tell him. Oh, how she wishes she could tell him. All of it, from the day Michael found her in the stairwell to this morning’s awful revelation. Right now, he only knows the worst parts: the day they met; the stabbing to remove the worm; the incident with the seven doors. What would he say, she wonders, if he knew the rest? If he knew that Michael was… her _friend_?

Jon steps forward then, and speaks with gentle gravitas; much more than he had managed before. “Sasha. Are you alright?”

“I will be,” she answers truthfully. “I will be. But I think—”

She gestures vaguely at the door, and he nods. “Please, take all the time you need.”

She rises, gathering her coat, her bag. When Tim moves to grab his own things, she reaches surreptitiously for the tape recorder and rescues the tape from within it. She hides it at the bottom of her satchel before anyone can ask.

“Oh, and Tim?” Jon calls, as the two of them are making their exit. “Sasha has the day, but _you_ had better be back after lunch. No excuses.”

“Of course, boss,” says Tim, and throws him a wink on his way out.

* * *

The rest of the morning passes quickly in Tim’s company: a dry cherry muffin and a latté at Starbucks; a soothing stroll through the Grosvenor Gardens on the way back to Victoria Station. He gives her a big hug before she heads down to the tube, and it’s warm and safe and Sasha wishes she could stay there. Tim is familiar, and familiar is what she needs right now.

She doesn’t know what she’ll do with herself once she’s back in her lonely apartment, though the thought of turning around and returning to the Institute makes her stomach churn. As she clutches the handrail, wedged between commuting strangers, she feels horribly small and meek. All she can think about is Gertrude, the woman she admired; the woman she wanted to be like someday. The woman who sacrificed Michael Shelley to a mad, impossible monster and hired her to take his place.

She recalls the message Michael left for her on the fridge: _Don’t let them take you alive_.

It makes sense now.

It makes _far_ too much sense now.

* * *

When her front door clicks shut, another door echoes it.

Michael enters from the far edge of her living room, the sofa and coffee table standing like an aisle between them. It doesn’t make to cross the aisle: just regards her in silence with its sad, blank eyes. Sasha stares back at it for a long moment before her legs start carrying her forward. She doesn’t think. Doesn’t hesitate. Just walks, right into its open arms. And then they’re hugging.

A month ago, she would’ve been repulsed to find it waiting for her here. She would’ve yelled. She would _never_ have let it get so close. Now, the hug punches a grateful breath from her lungs. She winds her arms around its waist, the easiest place to reach, and tries not to think about the way a human body is meant to feel.

Michael holds her gently in return, with reverence, the way a child might hold a treasured china doll. Its left hand settles in between her shoulderblades, the other carding a careful path through her hair. The hands feel like giant spiders, but Sasha doesn’t mind. Spiders don’t scare her any more than Michael does.

The hug lasts minutes before either of them speaks. What is there to say? That she’s sorry? _Words have a permanence that doesn’t befit me_ , it had told her last night. In this moment – with its chin resting on the crown of her head, so close she can feel its breath in her hair – words do not befit her, either.

It must understand. It must know, as they stand there, what she’s thinking.

Eventually, she manages to mumble: “I have the tape.”

“Which one?”

“The one that has _you_ on it.” Technically, all of the tapes feature a version of Michael, but she means the one that features _her_ Michael.

It pulls back from the hug, keeping its hands on her arms. “Can I see it?”

“Yes. It's in my satchel. Hang on.”

She walks back to the doorway where, in her rush to meet Michael, she had dropped it alongside her shoes. It doesn’t take long to rummage through and find the tape. When she has it, she hands it over without a qualm. _Archive property_ , her mind warns her, but she dismisses the thought. It’s too late now.

“Thank you,” says Michael, before snapping the tape clean in half.

Sasha watches, transfixed, as it tears into the reels, drawing them out like slippery black guts. It makes a horrible mess of them before secreting the broken tape away, never to be played again. As it does so, it shuts its eyes and sighs in relief.

Jon wouldn’t like it, Sasha knows. The tape was evidence. It could, one day, have proven vital. But she can’t help echoing Michael’s relief at its destruction. Her face still feels blotchy from crying. She never wants to hear that tape again.

When it has been thoroughly destroyed, the remnants stowed away, Michael lowers its hands and regards Sasha impassively once more. She can feel the evaluation in its gaze, though its features reveal nothing. It’s wondering how much of her is loyal to the Eye, after what she’s seen, what she’s learned. Wondering how much of her still wants to be its friend.

In the absence of cracking plastic, silence begins to creep in between them.

“Let’s go somewhere,” Sasha says.

Michael’s eyes widen a fraction. “Where?”

“Anywhere. Anywhere at all.” When Michael doesn’t respond – apprehensive, she thinks, or doubtful – she steps closer. “Come on. I have the afternoon off. Keep me company?”

Now, it begins to smile. “You don’t _really_ have the afternoon off.”

“I do,” she argues. “Jon let me go.”

“Because you were upset,” it says.

“Right. So I’m cheering myself up.” She loops their arms together, not even flinching at the way its arm has changed, from rough like a tree branch to floppy, like a swimming pool noodle. “Or, rather, _you’re_ cheering me up.”

“And you want to go… anywhere. You realise I could take you somewhere dreadful.”

“What _is_ dreadful?” she asks it.

Its answering laugh reverberates across her small flat, like a bell. At the far end of the room, beside her front door, a new door has appeared: garish, yellow.

“Alright, Sasha,” says Michael. “Let’s go anywhere.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who left a lovely message last time - I always love hearing what you think! The next chapter is going to be the last improvised chapter before we hit the tighter plot, which is pretty inflexible after that - so if you have any requests for little things you'd like to see between these two, let me know! I will try to incorporate what I can.
> 
> (Also, if you enjoyed last chapter's hefty angst and want to suffer some more, I did recently post a two-chapter Michael Lives AU which I've been told is pretty dark. Go take a look!)


	9. Anywhere

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Michael and Sasha have some fun with doors.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought these two deserved a break, so here is the much-needed Beach Episode before shit gets real.

The door opens in the flank of a steep cliff face, beneath which dark waters churn and spit. Sasha blinks against a blast of salty air and catches herself against the doorframe before she can be blown back inside. Michael catches her around the waist, holding her steady. Only then does she dare to re-open her eyes.

The cliff faces out towards a bloated sky, grey and heavy with clouds like steel wool. Gulls wheel and shriek overhead like alarm bells heralding the oncoming storm. Far below, to the left, a grinning wedge of beach grits its teeth against the seething ocean, which sings in a voice made of broken glass. Even the grass growing from the cliff face looks tough: a dark scudding carpet of green interrupted here and there by bright bursts of sea lavender.

Sasha has never been to a place like this. Her childhood memories are of commercial beaches: the kinds that have piers and flat, smooth sand and ice-cream sellers on the promenade. By comparison, this place makes her heart thud. It’s beautiful in a wild way.

And then she makes the mistake of looking down. The drop from the door’s stoop to the rocks below is dizzying. Sasha makes a fist in Michael’s lapel and gasps for breath.

“Where are we?” she yells over the wind.

“Man O’War Cove,” Michael answers – and it doesn’t need to yell for her to hear it. “Dorset, I believe.”

* * *

The two of them duck back inside the door so that Michael can make them a safer one, which opens directly onto the beach. It feels like something out of a fairytale, Sasha thinks: stepping out of a bright yellow door which stands upright amid shingle and stones, with nothing apparent on the other side of it. When she looks back, before the door can swing shut, she sees right through the frame to the cliffs beyond.

“This place is beautiful,” she says when she turns back around.

Michael hums in agreement. “I thought you would like it.”

Sasha has to take gargantuan steps over the rough, loose stones in order to catch up with it as it picks its way forward. The two of them stop at the tideline, on a bank of gritty grey shingle. Ahead of them, the shingle stretches sharply downward into the waves, which rush eagerly to meet it.

“What made you choose Dorset?” Sasha asks, finding Michael’s hand.

It laughs at her. “Always asking questions.”

“I can’t help it when you never volunteer to tell me anything.” She elbows it good-humouredly. “Come on. Is this – have you been here before? Is that it?”

By _you_ she means the Distortion, but a part of her also wonders whether this place might be a memory: one of Michael Shelley’s.

It shakes its head. “I saw the place on a postcard, is all.”

It’s not the most informative answer – it might not even be _true_ – but coming from Michael, any simple answer is worth a lot. “Well, thank you,” Sasha says, deciding not to push it. “This is just what I needed today.”

The two of them stand and watch the waves chase each other up the beach until the water is lapping at their shoes. Then, it becomes a race to stagger back up the slope to the door before the frothing water can catch them. Sasha laughs when a wave splashes up her leg, soaking her to the knee. Michael laughs too. She doesn’t let go of its hand.

* * *

When they duck back through the doorway, Sasha is expecting to find herself back in her flat, with its close, dusty air and the steady drone of traffic bleeding in through the windows.

The place they stumble out into is most decidedly _not_ her flat.

The heat is the first thing Sasha registers, smacking into her like a brick wall. The weak breeze coming in off the ocean – a very _blue_ ocean – does little to dispel it. The leg of her jeans that got splashed in Dorset is already stiffening, drying out, and it makes her laugh to think that Dorset must be miles away, yet she still bears traces of it. Sweat pricks under her arms, and she shucks her light summer jacket, tying it around her waist. Michael, in its heavy winter coat, looks unbothered.

“Go on, then,” Sasha says, gazing out over a fleet of blue fishing boats. They bob peacefully on the water, which is so clear she can see fish darting beneath it. “Where are we now?”

“Essaouira,” Michael tells her proudly. “Morocco.”

Sasha splutters. “ _Morocco_?”

“Is there something wrong with Morocco?”

“Michael, I _don’t have my passport_.”

Michael doesn’t _smirk_ exactly, but its voice curls with the sentiment. “Well then,” it says, “I suppose you had better not board any planes.”

She shoves it in the arm and it almost stumbles off the jetty.

* * *

Within the hour, they have wound their way inland from the harbour and found a terrace café, where great yellow parasols shield each table from the sun. Drenched in the yellow-tinted light, they sit and drink hot tea with mint, which Sasha is fairly sure neither of them ordered. The man who handed them the cups did so with a placid, thoughtless smile, and Sasha thought it best not to question him. Getting free drinks is far from the _worst_ thing that could be done with Michael’s power, she knows.

“I read Michael’s field notes from here,” she says, between sips. Just to fill the silence. “There was a ghost ship, wasn’t there?”

Michael shakes its head. “That was in Luanda. _This_ was the city Mikaele Salesa came through with a shipment of scarves that strangled people.”

“Oh. Right, of course.”

“One of them almost strangled Michael,” it carries on, gesturing to its own throat. “He had to cut through it with a shard of broken pottery. Almost stabbed himself in the neck a few times.” It laughs, like the memory is a fond one, though she doubts it was so for Michael Shelley. How ignorant must he have been, Sasha wonders, to go gallivanting across the world wherever Gertrude sent him and never flinch at the danger he was in? Did he even _know_? He must have, mustn’t he?

“Are you alright?” Michael asks suddenly. “You don’t look…”

It trails off when it can’t find the word, making a vague hand-movement to try and convey what it means. Sasha manages a smile. She doesn’t want to bring down the mood; not when they’re having such a nice day. “I just feel bad for him. He put up with a lot, before.”

“Yes, he did.”

“And you remember it all?”

“Yes, I do. I daresay I’m more aware of it than Michael ever was.”

Sasha can feel another question welling in her throat. What shape it will take, she isn’t sure. She doesn’t get to find out, because then Michael is pulling her up by the hand, leading her across the street to an alley where a yellow door is waiting.

“Come on,” it says. “I’m bored of Essaouira. Let’s go somewhere else.”

* * *

The next door opens onto a dance floor, which Sasha registers only when a sweaty man in a mesh vest and heels crashes into her.

“Sorry, darling!” he shouts in her ear. His voice barely carries over the pulsing, thudding bass.

The room is cavernous. A nightclub, Sasha thinks, though she’s never been to one this large. Through the darkness, twirling bodies are lit up in intermittent flashes of emerald and pink. A bar stands like an oasis on a raised platform at the far edge of the room.

“What kind of nightclub opens in the middle of the afternoon?” Sasha yells to Michael.

“Afternoon?” It laughs, a sound that spirals away with the music. “Finally, you’re beginning to _understand_. Time is an illusion. It doesn’t exist.”

“…We’re in Australia, aren’t we.”

“Perhaps.”

* * *

They dance.

It’s the middle of the afternoon in London – the time when Jon likes to record his statements, and Martin will tiptoe past his office door to avoid making a noise, and Tim will roll his eyes and deliberately rustle his files as he organises them – and Sasha is dressed in office clothes soaked with beach spray from a beach on the other side of the world. No version of the day she envisioned in her head had looked like this. No version of the day should have been _able_ to look like this. But that’s what makes it wonderful.

Michael is grinning at her in a way she’s never seen it before. It’s not the grin it wears to frighten people. It’s that small smile – the real one – but it’s bigger now; there’s _more_ of it. With the strobe lights playing in its hair and the blur of bodies all around them, it looks both more and less human than anything Sasha has seen.

As she sways and bounces to the music – giggling with the weird thrill of it all, sticking close to Michael, though she doubts she’d lose it in the crowd thanks to its height – she considers the fact that she should be afraid. Any one of Michael’s doors could, like it said, have led somewhere _dreadful_ – or nowhere at all. It could have trapped her in its corridors and left her there to wander forever, with no way out. None of her co-workers would ever know what happened to her.

She tells herself these things, but she doesn’t feel them. All she can feel right now is the music – a song she doesn’t know and can barely hear for its loudness – and the laughter bubbling up out of her body, almost beyond her control. She takes Michael’s hands without reservation, letting it spin her around in a whirl of colour and lights.

* * *

The door reappears just as Sasha is beginning to tire. Michael cuts them a path through the crowd, and the two of them stagger giddily over the threshold. Neither of them has drunk anything alcoholic, but Sasha feels a bit drunk anyway. The floor gives way on the other side, sliding under her shoes. _Shingle_. She flails but can’t save herself in time before she falls.

Michael lands on its hands and knees beside her, half-delirious with laughter. Behind it, the waves of Man O’War Cove churn in white tumult, further out now than they had been. Between Morocco and Australia, the tide has come in fully and begun to drag itself back out. There is orange in the sky now, too: a hazy stain, just beginning to spread across the clouds.

When she has her breath back, Sasha says, “This is one _nifty_ power, Michael.”

Michael sits up and shuffles to sit next to her, where she landed on her butt. “Yes.”

“Do you do this often? Just – travel? Wherever you want?”

It shakes its head. “I never thought to. And – it’s not as fun to travel on your own.”

She remembers what it said to her, the first time she invited it into her flat: “ _I visit many houses, but I am rarely invited._ ” A peculiar feeling – half pity, half pride – swells in her stomach as it dawns on her what that means. She is not just Michael’s friend; she is its _first_ friend. The first to let it in, and the first to be allowed in in return. Her chest tightens with sadness when she considers that she might be its first and _only_. A monster like Michael may find it easy to meet people, but it will never have much luck in getting them to stick around. It’s just too easy to be afraid of. Sasha wishes she could change that. Michael, under all the horror, is a startlingly good friend.

“I’ve never been outside of Europe before,” she says to it now. “Thank you. Really. This was amazing.”

“I’m just glad I could cheer you up,” it says.

She shivers and nods. “You have.”

“Would you like to do this again, another day?”

“Oh, for _sure_.”

She shuffles closer to it, leaning her head upon its shoulder. Going from a sticky Australian nightclub to a windy beach in Dorset has brought her out in goosebumps. Michael doesn’t comment; just winds its arm around her. The sensation of its touch isn’t one Sasha had thought _possible_ to adjust to – and she hasn’t. But she has, she thinks, gotten used to feeling surprised.

“I’m glad it was with you,” she says then.

“What?”

“This,” she says, sweeping her free arm out to gesture at the roaring beach, the sun just barely setting over the waves. “Travelling. Seeing things. You’re right; it’s better when you’re with someone. And I’m glad I got to see all this with you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this chapter of door-hopping shenanigans! 10% of this chapter was born of curiosity, wondering how Michael’s door power might be used for good, while the other 90% came from my desperate need for escapism. COVID-19 has made travelling near-enough impossible, so until it’s completely safe to do so again (which probably won’t be for another year at least :’)) I’m going to live vicariously through Michael and Sasha.  
>  As always, please let me know your thoughts – I eat them for power.  
>  Next time, we’ll be back into the angst! (Or something like it. Who knows.)


	10. Front Desk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Eye does not approve of Sasha's burgeoning friendship with Michael. Michael does not approve of the Eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, this chapter was fun to write. Much as I loved last chapter's break from all the plot, I'm glad to be digging back into it. Thank you so much to everyone who left a lovely comment last time; I really appreciate your thoughts!
> 
> Warning: the angst is back now with a vengeance, and there is a fair dose of horror/unreality in this one too.

As abruptly as she had found herself hopping through a door from Dorset to Essaouira, normality comes crashing back over Sasha the following day, leaving her excursion with Michael behind like a shimmering mirage in a rear-view mirror. If it wasn’t for the pair of sea-salt-encrusted jeans in her laundry basket, she might think she’d made the whole thing up.

She arrives to work brisk and early, determined to make up for yesterday’s mishap. At once, she regrets it. Elias is loitering around the Archives, checking up on everyone’s work, and he’s in a horrible mood. It wafts from him in waves, making Jon’s frown tighter, Martin’s nervous hesitations longer. Even Tim sinks down a little in his chair, subdued under the weight of it.

“Someone keyed his car last night,” Martin whispers when they’re both in the breakroom, safely out of earshot. He stirs sugar into Jon’s tea and winces when the spoon clinks against the rim of the mug.

“Oh, _shit_.” Sasha almost spits out her coffee. “Who?”

“He didn’t say. But he was grumbling about it earlier, while you were in document storage.”

Sasha tucks the information away, knowing that she’ll laugh about it later on with Tim. In the meantime, she has work to do. With the amount she’s missed, it’s surprisingly easy to fall into the rhythm of catching up. Not that she ever fell far behind. Her quick work-speed sees her through most of today’s and yesterday’s work by the time Tim and Martin are getting up to leave.

“You want me to walk you to the station, Sasha?” asks Tim. “Or—” he nods to Martin – “we could get drinks? All of us?”

It’s tempting.

“Maybe tomorrow,” Sasha answers. “I’ve got about an hour left of this and I’ll be done. I’d rather not leave it.”

“In the zone,” Tim nods. “Fair. See you tomorrow, then!”

The two of them head out. Twenty minutes later, Jon pokes his head around the door of his office and makes his quiet way across the room. He startles like a deer when he sees her. “Sasha,” he says, blinking. “You’re still here?”

“Not for long.” She shrugs and nods at her desktop. “One last thing to finish off.”

“Alright. Well, goodnight, then.”

“Goodnight.”

He slopes off, turning out most of the lights on his way but leaving one for her.

Once he’s left, the Archives fall into an oppressive silence. Sasha hadn’t realised how much quiet noise the others made – shuffling papers, clacking keyboards, slurping tea, clearing their throats, squeaking around on their swivel-chairs – but suddenly, left alone in their absence, she realises she misses it. It helps her to concentrate, hearing them prattle around her.

Helps her to tune out the feeling of being watched, too.

_The Ceaseless Watcher_ , Michael had called it – the being that the Institute apparently serves. That, and the _Eye_. Sasha doesn’t know who chose the name, but it feels very apt.

Another half-hour of silence trots past before she finally hits _save_ and closes her laptop with a sigh. But when she pushes back her chair and stretches – planning to rise – she realises she doesn’t want to leave. She feels itchy. Between yesterday’s escapade and today’s workday spent playing catch-up, she hasn’t had the chance for her usual perusal of document storage; her aimless wandering which so often yields unexpected knowledge. Upstairs, the cool summer evening tempts her – it would be so much nicer to breathe than the stuffy air of the basement – but she doesn’t want it. She wants to go and browse.

Michael had warned her about this. _Your curiosity is one that_ ravages.

Perhaps she would listen. Get up and leave, take her time with her commute, wander through Finsbury Park on her way back to her flat and take in some of that early-summer air. Hot tarmac, petrol and cut grass, a heady blend: she can taste it on her tongue already. She knows she should listen.

Perhaps she would… if she didn’t feel so hungry.

* * *

It’s with an air of trepidation that she opens the door to document storage. The pull is strong in her wrist, guiding her forward, like an invisible string has been tied there and it runs all the way up to her heart. She tries to imagine pulling back now and is abruptly struck by the image of a string tied around a tooth, the other end tethered to a toaster, about to be dropped down the stairs. A children’s trick. She shivers and steps into the cool room, somehow sure that if she leaves now – if she pulls back from the tugging – a small, important part of her will be torn out.

It doesn’t take long to find what the Eye wants her to find. A box of written statements has been haphazardly shoved behind a stack of folders on a bottom shelf, as if whoever put it there wanted to keep it from being seen. It’s dusty when Sasha pulls it out; dusty enough to make her cough into her sleeve. She blows on it and the dust billows.

Inside, the statement forms are yellowing, all handwritten with no typed copies. That’s unusual, she thinks. Usually it’s protocol to type a copy as soon as a new statement is handed in, for clarity’s sake. Whoever hid these here _really_ didn’t want them read.

Sasha’s hands shake as she picks up the first. Even now, part of her feels guilty for prying. But that’s not going to stop her.

She doesn’t know when she sat down – cross-legged on the concrete floor – but here she is, with only a dull overhead bulb to light her as she reads. Her heart is beating wildly in her chest. Before she lets herself skim the opening words, she forces herself to draw deep breaths and – remembering a panicked moment spent with her head between her knees on a park bench – counts to seven.

* * *

**_Statement of:_ ** _Sophie Wannerton, 27-year-old street busker studying at the University of Surrey, **regarding** an encounter with ~~a man~~ a thing called Michael._

_**Statement of** : Paul Fitzwilliam, 38-year-old pastry chef from Durham, **regarding** an encounter with a “Distortion.”_

_**Statement of** : Monica Salisbury, 40-year-old beauty technician and salon-owner based in Liverpool, **regarding** a bizarre encounter with a thing that called itself “Michael.”_

There are twenty-six statements in the box, each of them beginning in a similarly mundane fashion, and all ending with fevered descriptions of their descent into madness. Sasha doesn’t need to run a background check to know that all of the statement-givers have since been declared dead.

Bile rises in her throat as she lives through each moment. Finding doors where there should be no doors. Losing sleep. Pacing in circles in fractals in spirals in circles and back again. Not knowing whether it is sunrise or sunset. Drinking coffee anyway. Getting tempted by those doors.

And, woven through each statement, there is _Michael_.

It is a different being, in its element, when it has no cause for mercy and no inclination to be kind. Sasha had forgotten what it was, what it did. She had told herself not to forget, not _ever_ , and she had forgotten anyway.

Now, she shuts her eyes and Sees the way it holds Sophie Wannerton, who cries into its arms one night after almost two weeks of sleeplessness at its hand.

“ _Please_ ,” _says Sophie._ “ _I can’t do this anymore. I feel awful. Tell me what to do._ ”

_Michael strokes a knifelike hand through her hair, tucking a curl behind her ear. It rocks her gently on her couch, like a child. Sophie can’t see the wicked grin curling on its face, but Sasha can. “You should_ go _, of course,” it says gently. “Through the door. It’s better there.”_

_Sophie nods snottily against its chest. Two nights later, after hastily scribbling her statement in the Institute’s back office, she does as she is told._

Sasha Sees the day Paul Fitzwilliam gives up on his recipe book, after trying and failing for forty-five minutes to understand the measurements he used to know by heart. Michael is sitting on the counter beside him, watching him work with idle curiosity.

_“Battery acid,” Paul says, cracking the fourth triple-A into the mixing bowl with his sugar and his butter. All the eggs he had been planning to use have been shattered on the floor; their shells crunch stickily under his shoes. “A good kick. Peppery. Do you think?”_

_Michael reaches into the bowl and licks some butter off its finger. “Yes, it’s very good.”_

_Paul wipes a tear from his eyes. “I just – I just don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.”_

_The patisserie shuts down that day, but not before eight customers have perished. Paul is arrested straight out of the Institute, as he is walking down the steps. He still has flour up to his elbows and a delirious smile on his face. The next day, he vanishes from his cell._

Monica Salisbury painted one of her clients’ eyes shut with nail varnish before she came in to make her statement. Her business partner had died that morning, drinking tea infused with hydrogen peroxide. A young builder named Derrick had been snorting brick dust and didn’t understand why it was making him ill. Another man had spent the night with his sister’s family and glued rusty nails all over the floorboards, for them to find with bare feet in the morning. An elderly librarian had sliced up all her library’s stock into paper snowflakes, laughed when her bosses fired her, and cut up the bill they sent her, too. She didn’t seem to care that without work, she wouldn’t make her rent. She said Michael had found her somewhere else to live rent-free, just behind its yellow door.

Tears blur the words as Sasha reads, helplessly, unable to stop herself from Seeing it all. What horrifies her most isn’t the mad, desperate actions of Michael’s victims. It’s the words invariably written in the closing segment of the statement:

_Michael said I should come here and set down my thoughts._

_Michael thought it might help me to talk to someone, and he suggested you._

_Michael sent me to tell you what I’ve been doing._

And always, at the very bottom, before the statement ends:

_Oh – before I forget. Michael wanted me to tell you that it sends its love to Ms. Robinson._

* * *

Michael had promised to enact its vengeance on Gertrude. If it couldn’t kill her, Sasha supposes, the least it could do was taunt her with its existence. _Your fault_ , the words seem to gloat from the pages. _Their deaths, their suffering, all your fault._ _You made me love you. This is what my love looks like._

Sasha shoves the files back into their box and crams it aggressively into the cubby, screaming through her teeth when it doesn’t fit and she has to jam it even harder. Once it’s out of her sight, she stands – feeling giddy – and storms back into the office, gathering up her things like a whirlwind in reverse. She feels sick. She feels furious – with Michael, with herself. With Gertrude. They are all monsters, and they are all victims of monsters.

She doesn’t look at the time on her way up the stairs. Only when she reaches the foyer and sees the inky sky through the Institute windows does she realise how late it must’ve gotten. Her shoes are clacking across the parquet, the sound ringing out across the stillness, when she stops suddenly. It’s _not_ stillness. Not anymore.

After the silence of the Archives, her ears have attuned themselves to the slightest external noise. And now, standing in the entrance hall of the Magnus Institute, Sasha’s heart begins to hammer as she registers a _rustling_.

It’s coming from the front desk.

“Hello?” she calls. “Who’s there?”

A crown of blond appears as Michael pokes its head up from behind the counter.

Sasha can’t fight the dark, red feeling that spreads through her at the sight of it. “What are _you_ doing here?”

“Nothing,” it lies. “Nothing at all.”

“You don’t come to the Institute for nothing,” Sasha argues.

“I’m not as consistent as you think I am.”

Sasha shakes her head as she approaches. “No. Don’t give me that. You’re here for something.” It opens its mouth to protest; she speaks before it can. “For a creature made of lies, you’re not a very good liar.”

Michael shuts its mouth. It actually has the gall to look _hurt_.

“I suppose that’s why she chose _him_ , isn’t it,” Sasha goes on. “Michael Shelley. Bad liar. Honest person. _Good_ person, if I had to guess. The worst sort of person to mesh with something like you.”

Michael averts its eyes, returning its attention to Rosie’s computer. The screen is flickering oddly and smoke curls from the system unit. “You’re in a bad mood today,” it observes.

“I’ve been reading your statements,” she says. “The ones you sent to Gertrude.”

It flinches at the name. “Oh. I see.”

“Was it worth it?”

“What?”

“Hurting all those people, ruining all those lives, just to get at her. Did it make you feel better? Was it worth it?”

Michael deliberately doesn’t respond for a moment, typing something – maybe a password – into the machine. The screen turns blue, and in its glow, Michael presses its lips together in a very straight line. “I am a monster,” it says. “It is my nature to kill and hurt. I thought you had come to terms with that.”

Sasha feels tears pricking her eyes. “It’s different,” she says. “To read it. To See it.”

“Then maybe you shouldn’t have looked.”

Sasha finds, all of a sudden, that she wants to launch herself at it. Michael has angered her before. Frightened her. Saddened her. This is the first time it has made her feel _violent_. “It’s my nature to look,” she answers stiffly, warring against the impulse to dive over the desk. She imagines what it might be like to punch it properly, with intentions to hurt. To make a fist in its hair and _pull_. “I thought _you_ had come to terms with _that._ ”

Michael is still not looking at her. Still tapping around on the keyboard, though it doesn’t seem to be going very well. It sighs. “You’re right. I suppose we _can’t_ be friends, then.”

She hates how broken it sounds. Hates the apology already rearing in her throat; the urge to round the desk and pat its arm. She swallows back the apology with her tears.

“Tell me what you’re doing,” she says, just to regain some semblance of control.

“I’m trying to get you out of the Institute,” it says. “Off the system. Off the register.”

“…Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I can’t do it, I’m afraid. The systems here are watertight. Even _I_ can’t find any chinks in them.” Michael shrugs sadly. “I’m sorry. I wanted—it doesn’t matter what I wanted.”

“You wanted to save me,” Sasha finishes. “Why?”

It shuts its eyes. Digs its fingers into the keyboard, dislodging keys which fall and skitter like insects over the floor. “I cannot save you.”

“That’s not an answer. Why would you want that, Michael? Why do you _care_?”

“I – do – _not_ – care,” it tells her sternly.

“Once again, you’re a bad liar.”

Michael breaks the keyboard. The snap of plastic echoes loudly in the empty room. “One day,” it says – and Sasha hadn’t realised it could raise its voice – “you will _die_ , Sasha. It will be sudden. Unexpected. You will cease to exist. And –” it meets her eyes, so that she can see the set of its jaw, the tremor of its lip; its tears shining diaphanously, waiting to spill – “ _I won’t feel a thing_.”

Sasha has been fighting, this whole time, between the urge to punch it and the urge to hug it. Now, she loses. Like Sophie Wannerton, like countless other victims before her, she rounds the desk and pulls Michael into her arms. Unlike them, though, Sasha knows she is safe. Michael wilts against her, sobbing against the crown of her head. “I’m sorry,” it splutters. “I can’t save you, Sasha. I can’t do _anything_.”

“I never asked you to save me,” she tells it.

“But _someone_ has to,” says Michael.

And, without meaning to, she understands.

No-one saved Michael Shelley. That’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t about morals, or regrets. Michael isn’t trying to square its previous awfulness by doing something good. (It doesn’t even _regret_ its actions, really – perhaps it can’t.) It just wants to save her, because it _was_ her, once. And it doesn’t want to see her turn out like _it_ has.

_Don’t let them take you alive_ , said the fridge-magnet message. Because they will, if they get the chance, won’t they? The monsters. The Institute. They will take her alive and they will make her into something reprehensible. And more bodies will fall, fodder for the Eye. And they will keep falling and falling and falling, and Michael became a monster because they wouldn’t let him be anything else, and maybe it can’t help its own actions now but it can at least _try_ and keep her from meeting the same fate.

* * *

Sasha crouches down to unplug the computer from its socket before it can start an electrical fire. Michael waits for her as she roots around under the desk, humming under its breath. It has stopped crying now.

“Are you coming back with me tonight?” she asks it.

“That depends. Do you want me to?”

“I don’t know.” Sasha finds a plug, but she isn’t sure it’s the right one. She fumbles with the wires. “Nothing’s changed since yesterday, and yesterday, I would’ve said yes.”

“But you’ve changed,” it says. “You know things now that you didn’t before.”

“I knew those things before,” she says. “Not the details, maybe. The specifics. But I knew what you were. What you did. Like you said – I had come to terms with it, in my own way. I can’t turn around now and pretend like I’m above your company.”

Sasha remembers its bubbling laugh as it pulled her around on the dance floor. Remembers wondering at how safe she felt in its company, the company of monsters. She _had_ known, then. She had. She had just been in denial.

“But you can still change your mind,” it says.

“Yes, I can. Let me think for a minute.”

It falls silent as she continues to sort out the plugs, eventually finding the one she thinks she needs to pull. Rosie will be hopelessly confused when she comes in tomorrow morning and finds her keyboard shattered to bits, her monitor damaged beyond repair, but at least her desk won’t be scorched black. At least her phone won’t have gotten blown up.

_Wait_ – _her phone._ Sasha blinks at it on the desk. _Why is her phone still here?_

Sasha is about to stand again when she hears the front door swing open. There is a gasp and the sound of something thudding to the ground: a handbag, maybe. Michael freezes where it stands, eyes impossibly wide. Sasha stays low, watching horror spread across its face like a stain.

Then, there comes a voice.

Rosie’s voice, thin and strung out with despair.

“ _Michael_?!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone likes a cliffhanger, right? Right?? :)
> 
> As always, please let me know your thoughts on this chapter. I'm really excited to hear what you think.


	11. Reception

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this chapter took me forever to write. I blame it both on the UK heatwave - which left me languishing on the couch for several days, like a feverish Victorian ingénue - and the nature of this chapter. Hopefully it's worth the wait. I still have lots planned for this story and I intend to see it through to the end. (To everyone who's been reading and leaving lovely feedback, Thank You. Your words have encouraged me a tonne.)
> 
> Warning in advance: this chapter deals heavily with the topic of grief.

The world narrows around Sasha until Michael is all that’s left; Michael and the distant, shaky breathing that is Rosie. Sasha wishes she could see over the desk, but in order to do that, she would have to move. She doesn’t think she can move.

Michael doesn’t seem like it can move, either. Locked in its staring contest, it doesn’t sway, as it so often does, or fidget; it doesn’t so much as blink. _Afraid_ , Sasha thinks, out of nowhere. _It’s afraid_. But why would Michael be afraid? If anything, Rosie is the one that should be – but then, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know what she’s dealing with.

_Sasha_ should be afraid, too, and if she had any common sense, she would be. Because Michael is dangerous, more dangerous than she had really understood before tonight, and Rosie is defenceless, and Rosie isn’t Sasha and Michael has no reason to spare a thought for Rosie. No reason beyond that promise, which it made what feels like forever ago in the coffee shop; that flimsy promise not to eat her colleagues.

Thinking about it now makes Sasha want to laugh, in a twisted way. What is the value of a promise from a creature of delusions and lies? Standing there like that – even afraid – it reminds her of a cat, coiled spring-tight and rigid as it prepares to pounce.

_I am a monster_ , it had said, just now, when they were alone. _It is my nature to kill and hurt._

Rosie calls out again, voice small and wobbly in the gaping hollow of the foyer. “Michael, is that you?”

_Run_ , Sasha urges silently, hoping she can somehow project the thoughts out of her head. _Run. Go. Get out of here before it drives you mad._

Michael’s body shimmers, like light on the ceiling of a swimming pool; bluish and rippling. It’s a subtle change – only noticeable due to the low light – but it electrifies Sasha, who hadn’t known it could twist her perception that way. (It should’ve been obvious, but things in hindsight always are.)

Even if Michael chooses to honour its promise, she knows, there is plenty of damage it can do _without_ eating Rosie. It can – _will_ – still find ways to break her. For fun. For spite.

And because Michael Shelley knew her.

* * *

Rosie clears her throat and repeats her question. “Michael? Michael, is that—”

“Yes,” it answers tonelessly. Its voice has a wrongness to it, but it’s not the wrongness Sasha knows. This wrongness feels sadder, lonelier, as if its voice is a pale hand reaching up from the bottom of a well. “Hello, Rosie.”

Rosie shudders at the sound of her name in its mouth. Sasha can’t see her, but she hears the shudder in her voice, when she breathes and when she answers, “But you’re dead.”

“Yes.”

“How are you here?”

“I’m not.” Sasha watches powerlessly as Michael rounds the desk, each footstep ringing out with that same discordant _wrongness_. Wind chimes in an abandoned treehouse, she thinks nonsensically, trying to rationalise it. She blinks hard, focusing on moving her eyelids instead; wondering whether, if she concentrates, she might be able to move the rest of her. Why isn’t her body listening? Why are none of her thoughts making sense?

“I thought you might come back,” says Rosie. “It sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I know we get statements, sometimes, about this sort of thing. About… hauntings.”

“Yes.”

“Are you a ghost?”

“I suppose.”

“Right. Yes, right, I see.” There is the tentative squeak of shoe on parquet as Rosie steps toward it. Sasha wants to scream. She can’t see either of them anymore. Rosie sounds hopeful when she asks it, “Are you going to stay?”

“No,” it says, and for a moment it can’t smother its vehemence. Rosie makes a noise like a flinch. “No,” it tries again, softer. “I just came to see you.”

“Oh.”

“I wanted to say goodbye,” Michael adds, “because I won’t be returning.”

There is a pause, and Rosie reaches down to pick up her dropped bag. In that pause, Sasha shudders, fighting her own stillness. She thinks she might vibrate out of her skin. What is Michael _doing_? Why is it playing along? Rosie’s footsteps carry her to the waiting area, where statement-givers are asked to sit when the Archivist is busy. It’s nothing fancy: a long, low couch lined with gritty old material; a side table piled high with cheap magazines. The couch creaks when she sits on it, and again when Michael sits beside her.

“This doesn’t feel real,” Rosie says.

Michael laughs gently. “Maybe it isn’t.”

Sasha’s insides _writhe_.

“No, no, I always believed in ghosts,” Rosie carries on, oblivious. “It’s not you being here like this that feels unreal. Though having said that, why you would choose _me_ to visit from the afterlife is beyond my reckoning. It’s… knowing I won’t see you again, afterwards. That’s the thing. I can’t even remember what we talked about, the last time I saw you before you left for Russia. It can’t have been anything important. But this time, _knowing_ this will be our final conversation… _That’s_ what doesn’t feel real.”

“Of course I chose you,” says Michael, ignoring the rest.

Rosie splutters a teary laugh. “ _Of course I chose you_ , he says. _Of course_ , as if you don’t have other, more important places to be. No-one talks to me like that anymore, you know? Like I’m worth taking a second out of your day for. The staff… they all just ignore me now. Some of them are rude, even. Not _really_ rude, but – snippy. You know?”

“List their names,” says Michael. “I’ll visit their homes like a proper ghost and throw their things around.”

Rosie’s next laugh is choked off abruptly with tears. A whole flood of them. Sasha’s throat constricts in harmony. Images flare in her mind, unbidden: images of Michael Shelley over years, as Rosie must have seen him. Barrelling giraffe-like through the double doors with a sheaf of wet folders, the day they met; his hair wild and frizzed and the shoulders of his jumper drenched dark with rain. Whizzing out on a coffee run, stopping by her desk and – when he saw her busy with a visitor – mouthing, ‘ _The usual?_ ’ because of course, he memorised it. Hiding out with her in the Archive breakroom during an Institute Christmas party, drinking tea and chatting about nothing, because the Institute executives were scary and the basement was quiet and fancy wine gave both of them heartburn. Sasha’s chest swells with loneliness, longing for a person she never really met.

“I miss you,” Rosie gasps, when at last she can speak. “It’s not the same, now you’re all gone. First it was you. Your funeral was – God, no, never mind, you won’t want to hear about that. But it was awful. Then Sarah went, too, bless her heart. And Emma – and then old Gertrude. But you were the only one I knew. I _really_ miss you.”

“I’m glad someone does,” says Michael.

He still sounds wrong. Sasha can’t put her finger on what, exactly, the wrongness is, until recognition hits her like a paving slab to the face: this is the voice of Michael Shelley. Every trace of its distortion has gone.

When she realises, a _bad_ sensation pools in her gut.

_What’s wrong with you?_ she asked it once.

And it answered, _Everything, of course._ _It’s when something’s_ right _that you know I’m in trouble._

* * *

The two of them sit there in snuffly silence as Rosie finds a tissue in her pocket and dabs at her eyes. Sasha can’t see them from her position, crouched behind the desk, but the image comes crisp and vivid anyway. It’s the first time that has happened outside of a tape recording: the first time she has Seen into the present world. If she weren’t already so on-edge, Sasha might be impressed with herself.

“What happened to you?” Rosie asks. Then says, lightning-quick, “I’m sorry, that’s none of my business.”

Michael shrugs its slow, languorous shrug. “Don’t apologise,” it says. “I don’t mind. But I’m not going to tell you. I don’t think you’d like it.”

“Did it hurt? At least tell me that.” She lays a hand on its arm. Sasha is expecting her to jump back in surprise – to recoil from the feel of it – but she doesn’t seem to notice anything amiss. Not even the fact that, if Michael was really a ghost, her hand should’ve fallen straight through. “Tell me it was painless,” she implores. “Tell me it was quick.”

“I would,” says Michael, “but I don’t want to lie.”

When Rosie finds speech, it’s as frail as a butterfly’s wings. She looks dangerously close to crying again. “Oh, love. I’m so sorry.”

Michael smiles at her; the small smile, the real one. “Don’t be. I’m not in pain _now_.”

“Now that you’re a ghost,” she sniffles. “Yes. Yes, of course. That’s good. I’m glad you’re not—” She interrupts herself suddenly. “Where will you go? After this?”

“Away,” it says. “I’ll go away.”

* * *

Sasha remains crouched behind the desk as it comforts Rosie, feeling silent tears track their way down her cheeks. Her calves burn with the effort of holding herself still, and she has to jam a fist into her mouth to keep quiet. Eventually, the pair rise from the couch and Michael walks Rosie to the exit, handing over her forgotten phone without comment. Sasha hadn’t seen it pick it up.

“Take care, Rosie,” it says, neatening the collar of her coat, which had gotten crumpled when she put it on. It plucks away a stray hair on the lining like it’s nothing. “Look after yourself.”

“And you,” says Rosie. “If it makes sense to say that.”

“Thank you. I will.”

She turns, lifts a hand and pats him on the cheek. The gesture is so tender, so _familial_ , that Sasha feels something inside of her break.

“Goodnight, love,” Rosie finishes, as if this is any normal night, and they are any normal pair of colleagues parting ways on the doorstep. As if they will see each other tomorrow. As if the Michael she knows isn’t dead. Rosie’s voice wavers on the pet name.

“Goodnight,” Michael says in return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...okay, you've had the hurt. I promise the next chapter will be Full Of Comfort.
> 
> Thank you, as always, for reading, and if you enjoyed this, please let me know! I love to hear your thoughts and they really do spur me on.


	12. On the Couch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long, emotional evening. Time for some emotional reconnaissance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for another slow update! I like to get these things out fast, but life gets in the way sometimes and I’ve had a hectic week. Thank you to everyone who left kind words on the previous chapter; it really helps to know that people are liking this (and patient enough to wait for it)! We’re creeping closer to the end of this fic now – I’m estimating that there will be 15 or 16 chapters in all. This one is so disgustingly fluffy that I had to get up and pace a few times to give myself a break from writing it.

The doors fall shut behind Rosie, with an echo that leaves the foyer feeling infinitely larger, hollower and darker than it had been before.

The receptionist’s departure seems to break the spell on Sasha’s body. She uncurls and rises, on legs that shake beneath her. Michael is still facing the door, staring out into the dark space Rosie once occupied. As she watches, it hangs its head and lets out a soft, sad breath.

“You didn’t hurt her.” Sasha isn't able to keep the surprise from her voice.

Neither is Michael, when it answers, full of wonder: “No, I didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“She’s Rosie,” it says. And then, quickly, “You told me not to hurt Rosie.”

“No. I told you not to _eat_ Rosie.”

A creature like Michael, she knows, should have no trouble exploiting a loophole like that. _If a tragic end befalls them, it won’t be at my hand_ , were the exact words of the promise it gave her. (Which – she realises belatedly – gives it liberty to do anything it likes to her friends, short of delivering the killing blow. And she already knows how it worked around that problem with Gertrude.)

“You didn’t do this for me,” she continues. “Though now that you’ve mentioned it, I will ask you not to hurt them, either. My friends.”

Michael nods – says “okay,” – and pulls its shoulders inward; a strangely human gesture. If it weren’t for its voice – which has returned to normal now, or at least, the nightmarish echoing thing Sasha has learned to take for normal – she might _mistake_ it for a human. She can see why Rosie fell for its trick. Why anyone would. The thought doesn’t scare her as much as she’d like it to.

“You’re right,” it says, not sounding thrilled about it. “I didn’t want to hurt her.”

Again, Sasha asks, “Why not?”

“Stop asking questions. I don’t like questions.”

“Funny, that, when you spend so much time with me.”

Michael is crying again. It’s the sound of an echoing sob – one it can’t quite smother – that makes Sasha decide to stop pressing. Tentative, she steps out from behind the desk and heads over to where it stands: still hunched, its long arms wrapped around itself like a shield.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know you didn’t want this.” Michael sways and says nothing in response, still swallowing tears. She reaches out and puts a hand on its shoulder, which doesn’t feel like a shoulder so much as a juddering truck engine, ditched and left running. “You’re having a bad night, aren’t you? First the desktop, then Rosie. And me, prying too much and making it worse.”

She’s about to offer to leave; to give it space. But then:

“Don’t go,” says Michael. “I don’t want you to go.”

Sasha is struck abruptly with the mental image of human Michael Shelley, hammering and hammering on a door that will never yield. Raw red fists and raw red eyes. _Don’t go_ , _don’t go_. And Gertrude, walking away, never to return.

“Okay,” Sasha agrees, shaken. _Thanks_ , she thinks at the Eye. She doesn’t know whether it can read her mind, but in that moment, she hopes it gets a sense of how annoyed she is. _Quit dropping random bits of people’s lives into my head_. “Can we leave the Institute, though?”

At the word _Institute_ , Michael flinches hard enough to dislodge her hand. In the last few dreamlike minutes, it must have forgotten where they were. Now it remembers with barely-smothered horror. Nodding fervently, it strides across the foyer to its yellow door.

“Your place?” it asks hopefully.

“Sure.” Sasha tangles their hands together with a nonchalance she doesn’t feel. “Come on, you.”

* * *

Her little flat in Finsbury Park doesn’t feel quite real when they step back into it. The space itself is too quiet; the street outside with its late-night traffic of cars and laughing, drunk pedestrians too loud. Her cereal bowl from this morning sits haphazardly in the sink, waiting for her to wash it. There’s a book propped open on the arm of the sofa: _This Savage Song_ by V.E. Schwab. It takes Sasha a long moment to realise what’s wrong. In the wake of the evening she’s had, the place feels far too _normal_.

If Michael feels it, it doesn’t let on. Instead it takes a deep breath, as if it wants to draw the whole place into its lungs and not let it back out.

“Do you need to breathe?” Sasha asks automatically, then remembers what it said about questions. She doesn’t want to push it. Michael has been through enough tonight.

“No,” its answers, indulging her. “Or yes. It depends, I think.”

“Ah. Of course.”

She doesn’t ask _on what_.

Instead, she considers ordering food. It had been her plan, originally, when she decided to stay late at the Institute; better to get a quick delivery and scarf it than to worry about cooking, washing up. Only now that she’s here, she finds she isn’t hungry. She feels – somehow – as if she already ate.

Puzzled, she makes her way across the room and crashes on the sofa, patting the empty cushion beside her. Michael lingers in its artificial doorway before it approaches, folding itself carefully into the space and picking up a scatter-cushion to hold in its lap like a pet. As she watches, it begins to stroke the worn fabric with the backs of its knuckles. Its face is still frozen with that miserable look, eyes staring dead ahead into nowhere.

“There’s no need to look so tense,” she tells it. “You’re welcome here.”

“Am I?” It sounds deeply doubtful. “You never gave me your verdict before.”

“Well, I’m giving it now,” says Sasha. “You can stay.”

Michael smiles – the small smile – and settles. She wants to ask what Michael Shelley’s home looked like, but resists the urge before the Eye can dig its hooks in deeper. _Stop asking questions,_ Michael had said. _I don’t like questions_. No more questions tonight, she reminds herself sternly. No more.

* * *

Minutes pass in not-quite-comfortable silence. Sasha glances at the sink and considers washing up, just to give her hands something to do. She stays where she is. Michael taps its foot, then stops with a glance in her direction, as if remembering how its finger-tapping had hurt her head before. It still doesn’t look very relaxed.

Eventually, it blurts the words, “I miss it.”

Sasha blinks. “Miss what?”

Michael tightens its grip on the cushion in its lap, just gently enough not to tear through the fabric. “You know,” it says, but the word ticks up at the end, questioning. Hopeful?

Sasha wishes this was one of those instances where she could guess what it was talking about without trying. Sometimes it’s so effortless to understand, and sometimes she’s just lost. There’s Beholding, of course, but she can’t do that – she wouldn’t. Just thinking about it carries the memory of melting circuit boards; of those seven doors slamming wildly shut.

Frustrated, Michael sets the cushion down and grips its knees instead. Sasha wonders whether those are tearing under its grip. They don’t appear to be, but nothing about Michael is quite as it appears.

“You _must_ know,” it says again. “You _always_ know.”

_I miss it_ , Sasha repeats inside her head, trying valiantly to read between the lines. She has to try. Despite the horror stories, despite it all, Michael still feels like a friend, and it worked so hard to cheer her up yesterday. She wants to return the favour, but – miss Rosie? Rosie isn’t an _it_. If not her, then what?

“I’m sorry,” she says, wincing internally. She knows how much it hates to speak plainly. _Words have a permanence that doesn’t befit me._ “You’re going to have to be more specific.”

Michael screws up its eyes. “I don’t want to.”

“I can’t read your mind.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Well, out of respect, I agreed not to do that.” Sasha wants to reach out and prise one of its hands away from its knees, but it would be far too easy for one of those knifesharp fingers to cut her by accident. “Or at least,” she continues, “I agreed to _try_ not to do that.”

“You can, though,” says Michael. “This once.”

“Oh.”

“Please,” it adds.

_Oh._

She hadn’t realised it was a request. But now, she sees the truth it has been dancing oh-so-touchily around: the lines of tension running through its body, from one point to the next, holding it together like a constellation on the brink of shattering to bits. Because it’s scared. Because it doesn’t like to be Beheld, but it’s that or answer her in words. Because it wants her to understand and it doesn’t want to make itself understandable.

Sasha resents how fast the flicker of eagerness rises within her.

“Are you sure?” she asks, just in case.

“This once,” Michael repeats.

It curls tighter where it sits, like it’s waiting for her to strike it. Sasha could dive right in, but that would feel too much like delivering the blow. Too much like breaking something. Carving a rift between them.

“Come here,” she says softly.

Michael lifts its head. “What?”

“When I was a child, I was scared of blood tests,” she explains. “I used to cry before every appointment. It wasn’t the sharpness – I was fine with vaccinations. It was the feeling of something coming _out_ of me; of someone _taking_ it. I didn’t want the nurses to have my blood.” A little bemused crease appears between Michael’s eyebrows. Sasha doesn’t pause to revel in confusing it; just keeps talking, voice low. “When I made it to the nurse’s office, she had me sit on my mother’s lap and hide my face in her shoulder. So I wouldn’t have to see it – the blood leaving. It helped.” She opens her arms and repeats herself: “Come here.”

Michael hesitates – a nervous habit she’s certain must have carried over from Michael Shelley – and then it’s burrowing close, nestling its face in the crook of her neck. She lifts her legs up onto the sofa and settles back against the arm, trying to make herself as comfortable as possible, though she’s not as round and squashy as her mother was and Michael could never fit neatly against anyone. Eventually, they are suitably wrapped up in each other. She can’t quite parse the shape of it, but she can feel its shudders as if they were her own.

“Ready?” she asks it.

It nods.

* * *

Sasha shuts her eyes and Sees.

She isn’t sure what she’s expecting, but the stockroom in the Archives is definitely not it. Michael Shelley, cross-legged on the concrete floor, with a paperclip holding back his hair and a biro sticking crookedly out of his mouth, is not it. From nowhere and everywhere, she watches him work: sorting documents into piles; writing out sticky-note addenda. Twice, his hair falls out of its makeshift clasp; twice, he shoves it back. He stretches. She can feel the growing ache at the base of his neck.

Nothing happens. Sasha waits, and waits, and _nothing happens_.

And then she blinks, and Michael Shelley isn’t in the stockroom anymore.

He’s in the room with the copier now, frowning as it beeps, a little red light glowing unhelpfully on the side of it. There is a woman with him. Short, with cropped black hair and a butch flavour to her attire; to the languid way she stands. Sasha doesn’t know her, but Michael Shelley does, so she recognises her at once. Her name is Sarah Carpenter. She has a civil partner and two dogs. She wants to get married, but she will die long before 2013, when same-sex marriage is legalised in the UK. A creature of fire will open its body and consume her. Michael Shelley doesn’t know that yet. He won’t live to find out. He will be away when it happens. Unbeknownst to both of them, he will end the same day she does.

“Shit,” says Sarah now, in the copy room in January 2011. “Is she jammed?”

Michael Shelley nods. “I think so. Or – I don’t know.” He gestures at the red light. “I don’t know what this means.”

Sarah slams her fist down on top of the copier. Michael Shelley flinches, but smiles. “I really don’t think that’s going to help.”

“No,” agrees Sarah, “but it would’ve been _cool_ if it had.”

Sasha blinks again and she’s in Essaouira, bright gold sun searing down in shafts between the flaps of a tarpaulin. Michael Shelley is lying on a dusty warehouse floor, next to a packing crate loaded with scarves. One scarf has been split from the rest: it lies discarded, white as a flag of surrender, fraying where he sawed through it and spotty with his blood. Thanks to that scarf, Michael Shelley is clutching at his throat and spluttering for breath.

Sasha blinks again, without eyes, omniscient: the whole world vanishes and remakes itself in a heartbeat. Sarah is there now, crouched low over her colleague, who has scrambled onto hands and knees. She’s dressed in combat trousers and a camisole and she flaps her hands like she wants to embrace him. She gives good hugs – she has strong arms – she makes jokes about hugs being her motive for the gym – she _used to_ make jokes—

“The fuck happened? Are you _okay_? Jesus.”

“Scarves. Don’t touch them.”

“Evil scarves. Got it. _Shit_ , Michael.”

Sasha doesn’t want to blink, but she can feel it coming. Even without eyes, whatever framework she is seeing through begins to sting like it’s drying. The next scenes flutter past like dropped leaflets, or litter. There is a bus running through a puddle, sending dirty water spraying every which way. There is Michael Shelley, chilly and tired, boarding and sitting near the back. There is Gertrude, frowning over her case notes one morning, barely lifting her eyes from them to accept the tea she’s offered. There is Sarah again, smacking the vending machine in the stairwell – it seems to be her solution for most faulty equipment – and whooping in victory when the mechanism relinquishes her Twix. None of it is important. All of it is important. All of it is—

_I miss it_.

All of it is human.

* * *

When Sasha opens her real eyes in her real flat, she feels as though she’s breaking the surface of a dark and murky pond. She draws breath sharply, lungs juddering and starved. Michael is still bundled against her, skin-numbing, digging in at odd angles.

“You miss it,” Sasha says. She thinks she gets it now. All those memories, fleeting and insignificant. A life lost and never fully appreciated.

But then Michael nods and says the opposite of what she was expecting. “It was better before. When none of it was in my head.”

“Before you were Michael?”

“Yes. Michael hurts.”

Sasha makes a sympathetic noise. It _must_ hurt, she realises. Mustn’t it? To miss a life that was never fully yours. To resent it. To want anything _but_ that life, because that life is human and you aren’t; that life is normal and simple and you can’t be. But to miss it all the same. (And to miss the time when you didn't have to miss it.)

Sasha doesn’t know what to say, so she settles for the first thing that comes to mind.

“I think I would’ve liked him, you know.”

“…Michael?”

“Yes.” Part of her feels like she’s treading on weak floorboards, admitting this. But Michael hasn’t moved, so she pushes on. “If we’d been in the Archives at the same time, I mean. I think I would’ve liked him. We might’ve been friends.”

Michael is silent for a minute. Then, quietly, it decides to play along. “He would have found you intimidating.”

“Would he? Why?”

“You’re very good at your job.”

“So was he.”

“Not like you. You were one of Ms Robinson’s favourites.” There’s a bitter note on its tongue as it says that, but it's gone as quickly as it came. “He would have liked you, though. Once he got used to you.”

Sasha smiles. “I’m glad.”

Another pause. “I’m sorry you were stuck with me.”

“Don’t be daft. I like you as you are.”

To her surprise, she means it.

Michael sighs, a soft puff of air against Sasha’s earlobe. “Well, that makes one of us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you were among the crowd who waited for this update, thank you for your patience! And if you’re new, hello! Please let me know what you thought of this chapter. I wrote it very fast, hopped up on coffee at 2am, so I hope it’s at least somewhat cohesive.  
> Also: Sarah Carpenter is a butch lesbian in my heart and I will die on this hill.


	13. Field Trip

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha accompanies Tim out into the field.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter and the next weren’t initially planned for the story, but I dreamt them up in a fit of inspiration the other day and just knew I had to make room. Every time I think I have an estimated length for this fic, it just gets longer! For now I’m saying it will be 17 chapters at minimum, though it may end up getting pushed to 18 or 19, depending on whether any other ideas catch me by surprise. It definitely won’t go over 20.  
> Thank you so much to everyone who has commented on the last few chapters. Your feedback makes my day, and I’m glad to know people are getting serotonin out of this weird, twisty friendship!  
> This time, we have some more Tim Content™. Enjoy.

It’s Wednesday morning and Sasha is clicking through old Reddit pages on the Wayback Machine, chasing up a dying ember of a lead, when Tim leans down and wafts a paper cup under her nose.

“Is that—”

“A honeycomb latte macchiato? You bet it is.”

“But break isn’t for another—”

“Two hours! Yep, I know. _Unless_ you’ve been cleared for a field trip.”

Sasha swivels in her chair, coming nose-to-stomach with Tim. He backs up out of respect, but only a little, still near enough that she could lean forward and headbutt him if she wanted. He’s holding a coffee in each hand; one, his favourite flavour; the other, hers.

“Have you been cleared for a field trip?”

“Yup!” says Tim, popping the ‘p’. He hands her the honeycomb; it’s still hot through the cardboard. “And it’s your lucky day, because Jon gave me the pick of you or Martin to join me on this one, and I chose you!”

“Poor Martin,” says Sasha, though she’s secretly pleased.

Tim rolls his eyes. “I _know_. What will he _do_ all day, alone in the office with _Jon_?”

He gives her a very knowing look.

“Oh, you devil.” Sasha stands and grabs her bag. “What’s the trip?”

“Today, my dear Watson, we’re investigating a _haunted house_.”

* * *

Thanks to some light traffic, it takes Tim two hours to drive them out to Oxford. Sasha finds that – even knowing she could get there in the blink of an eye through one of Michael’s doors – she doesn’t mind the wait. It’s nice to sit in the car with Tim. He likes the same radio stations she likes, and they listen in companionable quiet – sipping their coffee – as the tall spires of skyscrapers filter out, become billboards, become motorway.

Once they’re on a straight, easy stretch of road, Tim starts to explain the case. Sasha has the file on her knees, but reading in the car makes her nauseous and she likes the way Tim tells it better.

“So get this,” he starts, taking his eyes off the road to cast her an excited glance. “Late last week, a twenty-something-year-old woman named Renée Boivin shows up and tells Jon she was employed as a nanny in a haunted house. A real, genuine haunted house.”

“Go on,” Sasha prompts him.

“She said that Jordan – that's the kid she was looking after – had been having problems, sleepwalking and acting strange, so his parents had pulled him out of school and employed her to mind him instead. They’d been looking for a suitable nanny for ages, but couldn’t find one, because Jordan scared off most of the candidates. Not Renée, though. Her parents always fostered while she was growing up, she said, so she was used to troubled kids. And the pay was good. Better than most nannying jobs. Now, I should mention that this family is _stupid_ rich. _Lukas-family_ rich.”

“Oh, shit!”

“Yeah – it’s one of those creaky old manor houses too,” Tim laughs. “The _Dufresne_ manor. Anyway, Renée arrives and Jordan doesn’t talk for the first week she’s there; just sits and draws with his crayons. He’s not nearly as difficult as she’d been led to believe. Just shy, from the looks of it. Renée gets shy kids, so she decides to bond with him by joining in, right? See if he’ll open up to her through his art. And it works.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. He starts telling her about the people in his drawings. Most of it’s your standard seven-year-old stuff: his parents, his house, and the housekeeper. He even draws Renée a few times, in this little white pinny which she doesn’t actually have, but is probably supplanted from some Disney movie where the nanny wore one.”

“So what’s the catch?”

“Well, Renée was talking to the parents one night, right? Telling them what good progress she seemed to be making with Jordan. And it turns out that they _don’t have a housekeeper_.” Tim waggles his fingers for dramatic effect. “Creepy, right?”

“I guess?” Sasha shrugs benignly and slurps the dregs of her coffee. “It could just be an imaginary friend. Lots of kids have those. I know _I_ did.”

“Yeah,” says Tim. “Me too. And that’s what Jon suggested, when Renée first said it.” Sasha motions for him to continue. There’s a grin pulling at the corner of his lips; a grin which tells her he’s saving the best detail ‘til last. Curiosity prickles under her skin.

“What?” she prompts, when she can’t stand it.

“Well,” says Tim, and the grin spreads. “The thing is, Renée had _met him_.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah! She’d met the guy! He came in to dust a few times when she was sitting with Jordan! So she tells the parents this, obviously – because they need to _know_ if some random man is breaking into their house – and the parents go really quiet and tell her that they’ve seen him too, but he’s not their housekeeper and they can’t make him leave.”

“Oh, shit. That _is_ spooky.”

“Renée reckoned he must be a ghost,” says Tim. “Some echo of an old housekeeper who worked there before the Dufresne family inherited it. But this house has apparently been in the family for generations, and they’ve still got the records – I checked them. All of their previous housekeepers have been women, right back to the 1700s.”

“So who is he? Just some _guy_?”

“Jon thinks so,” says Tim. “You know how he gets. _There is no evidence that this man’s presence is supernatural, and it would be better for the family to contact the police_ , yada-yada. But this is where things get _really_ weird.”

Sasha feels a tingling sensation in the back of her neck; her shoulders; her calves. She can’t help it: she’s excited. “Go on.”

“Renée tried to leave that day,” Tim says. “Packed up her bags, all ready to quit. But when she walked out of her room, she couldn’t find her way downstairs.”

“…Okay?”

“Now, this is fairly standard for a spooky old manor house, right? Lots of long hallways and big, empty rooms and an old-fashioned lift that squeals when people use it. They even – they even have _dumbwaiters_. It’s _weird_. But the thing is, Renée _knows_ this house. She’s navigated from her bedroom to the front door dozens of times. The way she described it, it was like the layout had suddenly changed.

“She spent hours trying to find her way out of there before she gave up. Once she’d unpacked her things, the house went back to normal. It was like – she said – it was like it would only let her leave if it knew she would come back. The _moment_ she tried to make a permanent escape, the hallways would scramble.”

“Yikes.”

“ _Big_ yikes. When she eventually made it back downstairs, the parents started weeping when they saw her. They said she’d been gone for a week! And Renée thought it only had been a few hours. The housekeeper, though – he didn’t act like anything was amiss.”

“…Oh.” With horrible suddenness, it clicks. Sasha opens the file and begins skipping through the pages, a little frantically when she can’t find what she wants. The words blur. The paper rattles under her trembling touch. “Did she say anything about doors?”

“I mean, yes,” Tim says. “That was part of the scrambling. Turns appearing where there hadn’t been turns, doors where there had never been doors. All that sort of thing. Why?”

“No reason.” Sasha fakes brightness, which comes out a touch manic. Her heart is skipping in her chest like a stone on a lake. Any moment now she expects it to plunge, as into icy water. “By the way, what was the housekeeper’s name?”

She sees it written on the papers at the same moment Tim says it: “Michael.”

“Oh,” she says. There it is: the plunge. “Oh, I see.”

* * *

Tim pulls over on a grassy verge when he sees the stricken look on her face.

“Shit, Sash,” he says. “I didn’t think – you don’t think it’s _your_ Michael, do you?”

“I think so,” she says between gasps for air. “Yes.”

“ _Shit_.” He takes the file from her lap and shoves it onto the dashboard, then hops out and rounds the bonnet so he can open the door from her side. Sasha is grateful for the rush of cool air that greets her, and more grateful for Tim’s arms as he gives her an awkward crouching hug. “We can go back,” he says. “I can take Martin. I’m really sorry. I didn’t make the link.”

“No,” says Sasha. “It’s okay. I’m fine.”

“You’re hyperventilating.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Sash—”

“It knows me, Tim,” she blurts. “Michael knows me. Maybe I can – talk it round. Tell it to let the family go.”

She tries to imagine it: storming into Michael’s hunting ground and asking it to give up its meal, simply because she _wants_ it to. The thought fills her with a buzzing, nauseating worry. Unlike with her colleagues, she doesn’t have a personal excuse this time. These people aren’t her witnesses for another case. They’re fair game. She has no right to ask Michael to leave them, not when it’s hungry, not when it needs them to eat, but… there’s a _child_ in that house. She can’t just _let it_ —

“And what makes you think it would listen?” Tim’s eyes are wide and shiny as pennies in a wishing-well. He grips her knees through her jeans; gently enough not to hurt; firmly enough that his thumbs turn white against the denim. “It’s a _monster_ , Sash.”

“It’s worth a try,” she says.

She resists the urge to say the words on the tip of her tongue, scared that if she voices them, they will no longer be true; that they never were.

_It’s_ my _monster_.

Is it? she wonders. Was it ever?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …Things couldn’t be simple forever, could they?  
> I’m really excited for the next few chapters, because this is where the Action kicks in, and I do so enjoy writing action. As always, please let me know what you thought of this! I eat comments for power.
> 
> (Also, just to forewarn you, the next chapter might take a little while. But that's because it's going to be Big.)


	14. Haunted House

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tim and Sasha investigate the haunted house.
> 
> The haunted house does not take well to investigation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter sprawled even larger than I expected, so to save from rushing it, I’ve decided to split it into two. The next chapter is the one where things will come to a head, but I had so much fun setting the scene here.  
> Thank you to everyone who has left lovely feedback so far! You all make my day.

_We are oil and water now, Sasha James._

Sasha hears the words on loop in her mind as they park up in front of the Dufresne Manor. It feels like only yesterday that Michael had said them, seated at her elbow in her little kitchenette, with its head turned sharply away from hers. _Oil and water_. It isn’t that they are enemies. It isn’t that they are at war. But the Eye and the Spiral have never been, can never be, compatible.

Sasha has never had cause to see it until now. Has always thought her will to be her own. But she isn’t here as herself; as Michael’s friend; as Sasha James. She is here as an employee of the Magnus Institute. A hand of the Eye. And the Michael she faces in that house will not be _her_ Michael. It will be the Spiral’s thing. Both of them, wielded like knives against each other by powers greater than themselves.

Her stomach churns just thinking about it. She doesn’t want to undo her seatbelt. She wants to turn around, back to London, back to _safety_. But if she leaves now, then she will see Michael again: who knows when, who knows where. And she will see the stain of this family’s blood on its hands. On hers.

Tim cuts the engine and the car goes quiet. “Sash?”

It’s an effort getting words to leave her throat intact. After a few failed tries, she manages to choke out, “Yeah?”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yeah,” she says, more firmly this time. “Michael needs to be stopped.”

Tim’s warm hand comes to rest atop hers, where it sits paralysed on the seatbelt clasp. “You don’t have to do the stopping,” he says, mistaking the conflict in her voice for fear. His thumb strokes her knuckles, rough-smooth. Normal and good.

“Someone has to,” she answers.

As the words leave her mouth, she hears them echoed in Michael’s voice:

_I never asked you to save me._

_Someone has to._

What kind of friend is she, to do what she is about to? To look Michael in the face, knowing full well she owes it her life, and ask it to starve? To hurt itself for her?

Because that’s what she’s going to ask. Because it’s her friend, and she wants it to suffer more than she wants this family to suffer.

Will it still care when she stands between it and its prey? When she asks it to do the very thing it swore, in the coffee house, it wouldn’t?

_Of course, I refuse to_ starve _myself for your appeasement_ , it had said.

There had been a laugh in its voice then. As if the very thought of her asking such a thing was ridiculous. She dreads to think what she will find in its voice today, when it realises that she is going to.

* * *

Tim unbuckles her seatbelt for her. Together, they climb out of the car and begin the long trudge up the long, white gravel driveway. The house stands oppressive in the distance, poking up out of the ground like a well-manicured headstone. Maybe, Sasha thinks as she walks, this confrontation is a kindness. Maybe they can find a peaceful solution.

A brisk wind, uncharacteristic of June, nips at her arms.

Tim rings the bell. “This place is fancy,” he says, as if they’re just two office grunts on a normal tour of a normal haunted house. His hand brushes her shoulderblades, just shy of coming to rest there. She gets the signal: he’s here by her side; he will always be here by her side.

“Yeah,” she answers, gratefully, and points across the lawn. “Look. They have topiaries.”

The little garden sculptures are probably supposed to be animals of a sort, though from this distance, they’re shambling, featureless shapes. Tim laughs. “They should hire a new gardener.”

They lapse into quiet, waiting for someone to answer the door.

Then: “I’m not afraid of Michael,” Sasha blurts.

It’s true, and she used to think it was a good thing. But what is a monster that you do not fear? An obstacle you have to move. She has always been so good at getting around Michael, but there’s no getting around it now. Reading about the people whose lives it ruined in the past is one thing – but it’s different, knowing that this time, she can _do something_ about it.

“You have every right to be,” says Tim.

Sasha blinks. “What?”

Too deep in her thoughts, she had forgotten what she said. Tim is opening his mouth to answer her when the door’s hinges squeal, and there – standing on the threshold of the house – is a slender young woman in a paper-white hijab. Her eyes are red, as if she has been crying. In a breathless voice, she asks, “You’re from the Magnus Institute?”

“Yes!” says Tim. “That’s us. I’m Tim, and this is Sasha. You must be Renée?”

“Yes, yes,” she splutters. “Bless you, bless you. I’m so glad you’re here.”

* * *

Renée ushers them into the hallway like she’s afraid they’ll disappear if she waits for too long. Once their feet have landed firmly on the polished marble floor, the door slams shut behind them, locking out the daylight. Without it, the foyer of the Dufresne Manor is dark and gloomy. Colder than a house like this should be, in June.

“That’s not ominous at all,” says Tim, glancing behind him at the tall, dark wood.

“I’m sorry,” says Renée. “I have betrayed you.”

Tim whips around and they both stare at her. In the sallow light of the foyer, she looks paler than she did a moment before. Chalkier. _Flimsier_. Sasha catches herself thinking of the phrase, _white lie_. She shivers. Wishes Tim would hold her hand. Wishes she could summon the will to move and hold his.

“What do you mean?” says Tim.

“ _C’est des mensonges_. It takes you. It is very hungry.”

“This is a trap?” Tim blinks at her. “Then – why did you let us in?”

“To feed it,” says Renée. She sounds miserable. “ _C’est la verité_. Now that you are here, it won’t let you out.”

So much for their promise, then, thinks Sasha. Michael had sworn not to eat her or her friends. It must have known Renée had been to the Institute; that she had chosen them, invited them specifically. Unless – what if it didn’t? This could all be a mistake, couldn’t it?

“So you didn’t bring us here to help you,” says Tim. “You wanted to give it an offering. A sacrifice. So it won’t eat _you_. Is that right?”

“It is too late for us now,” says Renée. “Too late. But it is still so very hungry.”

Sasha swallows the bile rising in her throat. Of _course_ it isn’t a mistake. Not one she can forgive, at least. Whether or not Michael has decided to trap her and Tim, it still has a family in its jaws. “Where are Mr and Mrs Dufresne?”

“No,” says Renée. “That isn’t a part of the game.”

“What game?”

“Goodbye.” As they stare at Renée, in mingling horror and disbelief, she grows whiter. Whiter and whiter – her skin, her hijab, her clothes – until she is no more than paper, crinkling and unfolding before their eyes. Like origami in reverse. Like a flower growing back into a bud. She unfolds and she unfolds and then she is gone, and they’re left staring at a crinkled-up ball of A4 cartridge paper on the floor.

Tim says, “Shit.”

“Yeah,” Sasha echoes, for lack of better things to say. “Shit.”

* * *

They try the front door first, but it doesn’t budge, even when Tim attempts to shoulder-barge it. The dark wood is a closed mouth; the ornate plasterwork of the foyer ceiling a little too suggestive of teeth. With no other options, it’s decided that they will have to look around. What they’re looking around _for_ is left unspoken, though Sasha’s heart begins to hammer as they wind their way up the grand marble stairs. There is no key, no makeshift battering ram that will free them from this place. Only Michael. And Michael might not be in the mood.

“Rule number one,” says Tim, when they reach the landing. The hallway beyond branches off into two identical passages. “Don’t split the party.”

Sasha nods and takes his hand. “Left or right?”

He squeezes her palm. “Does it matter?”

If Michael wants to be found, Sasha knows, then they will find it. If it wants to remain hidden, however, then they could scour the manor top to bottom and find nothing.

“I suppose not,” she says.

They turn left. Down, down the white-walled hallway, which feels claustrophobic even with its high, corniced ceiling. Several times, they pass doors, which are locked when they try them. In one place, the white rug which runs like a stripe along the floorboards is bunched up. Tim trips and almost falls, but Sasha catches him in time. She can’t help but read the rucked-up carpet as a threat: _Don’t bother running. I will stop you_.

Eventually – after an indeterminable amount of time spent walking – they reach an open doorway. Through it, they find a brightly-lit children’s playroom, with a plush white carpet and enormous windows which overlook a sprawling garden. The walls are papered in blue-and-white toile de jouy, which, upon closer inspection, features numerous characters from _Alice in Wonderland_ – because, Sasha thinks, of course it does. What concerns her more is that someone has gone around the room with a thick black crayon and scratched out the faces of every single toile de jouy creature.

“Well, this is disturbing,” says Tim, stepping inside. Sasha follows. Together, they circle the room, taking inventory of its furnishings. There is a surprisingly neat toybox, filled with dolls and building bricks and other miscellany, all of it covered in a fine layer of dust. There is a little, child-sized coffee table, and beside it, a giant tub of crayons, which have all been worn to stubs. Beanbags have been scattered here and there, blue to match the walls. One of them still bears the indent of the child who sat on it.

And then there are the drawings. Dozens of them, stacked on the table; strewn across the floor; pinned to an easel in the corner. Some of them are, like Renée had told Jon, your run-of-the-mill childhood drawings. The Dufresne manor with its weird topiaries, captured surprisingly well. A man and a woman in blocky office-wear – crayon-pink skin bright against the grey of the rest of them – labelled _mummy_ and _daddy_ in rough, squarish letters. Sasha picks up the family portrait, struck by something wrong with it. It’s not until Tim glances over her shoulder with a grimace that she realises the problem: both parents wear exaggerated frowns.

“Oof,” says Tim. He hands her another drawing. “This your Michael?”

It’s another full-body portrait, helpfully labelled with Michael’s name _._ A tall, thin figure with spiralling yellow hair and fingers just a touch too long. If you were to look at it without knowing the truth, Sasha thinks, you might mistake it for a child’s poor attempt to draw proportions well. But she knows the distorted version of Michael in the mirror, and this is the closest rendition she has ever seen of it.

Unlike Jordan’s parents, it has been drawn smiling.

“Yeah,” she says. The paper crinkles in her grip. Before she can help herself, she has scrunched the drawing up and thrown it at the wall. It lands on the carpet with an unsatisfying _tmp_. “Yeah, that’s it.”

The rest of the drawings are nonsense. Just scribbles, though the longer Sasha looks at them, the more they seem to undulate; to _ripple_ , as if they are alive. Tim sees her getting lost and takes her hands, standing in her space so that she has to look at him instead.

“Breathe,” he says.

Sasha hadn’t realised she was struggling. Now that Tim has said it, though, she takes stock of herself and finds that her lungs feel as screwed up as the drawing of Michael. She draws a deep breath, forcing herself to smooth out the crinkles. Inside her head, she hears a voice, soothing and strong: _Count to seven._

She trusted that voice once. Maybe even loved it, a little. Nausea crawls up her throat.

“We’ll fix this,” Tim is saying, though he doesn’t sound sure. “We will. You and me.”

It’s the wobble in his voice that forces her to collect herself and nod. Of course, she thinks; Tim is scared. He has never faced Michael before. Everything he knows about it is bad. He’s trying to be strong for her, bless him, but she sees it in his eyes: he’s so scared.

“Of course we will,” she says, with more sturdiness than she feels. What she means is _I’ll fix this, because I’m not letting you die_. She remembers the day Michael visited her at work, slamming its hand into the screen of her desktop, leaning over her desk with a sneer. _Had_ it been sneering, or just scowling? She can’t remember. She doesn’t think it took joy in frightening her, but it might have. Either way, what she remembers best is the way it made her _feel_ : reckless, like she would have let it kill her right then and there if it meant an end to all the violence. “We’re getting out of here,” she adds, and again, she is lying. _You’re getting out of here_ is the truth. Or she wants it to be.

“Next room, then,” says Tim, kicking a crayon under the table. “I’m not loving this one.”

“Next room,” she nods, and leads him back to the door.

A sigh of relief passes through her as she ducks back over the threshold. Being in there felt like having a blanket over her face, gently smothering. The hallway isn’t much better – so narrow and long that, whichever way she faces, she will have a blind spot – but at least she can breathe.

“Sash,” says Tim. And then there’s a slam.

She spins around. “Tim?”

The door is shut.

“No,” she says. “No. Tim. _Fuck_.”

“Sash? Shit, Sash – it’s locked—”

She hammers on the door, first with open palms and then with fists. From the other side, she can hear Tim doing the same. Cursing loudly. Yelling her name. There is the futile jiggle of a doorknob. _Don’t split the party_ , he'd said. Too late for that now.

Her blood hums loudly in her ears. Loud and angry and terrified. What possessed her to take Michael at its word? What has she _done_? She keeps hammering on the polished wood, desperately and fruitlessly, until she is out of breath. _Count to seven_ , says the voice in her mind, but she ignores it. She ignores it and hammers and hammers until she can’t hammer any more, at which point she wilts against the door and rests her forehead on the pane of it.

“Wait there,” she says. “Just – wait there.”

“Not much choice, is there?” says Tim. His voice is so near, yet so horribly muffled. She imagines him on the other side, his hands where her hands are, his forehead pressed to the woodgrain just a few inches above hers. “I could try and jimmy the window, but it’s a full flight up and there’s a patio underneath. I’d break my legs.”

“I’m going to get you out of there,” says Sasha. “I promise.”

“Just be careful.”

“Always am.”

She presses a kiss to the door before she leaves it.

* * *

Alone, the winding corridors feel more oppressive than they had before. Whether that’s due to a literal pressing-in of the walls, a deliberate eerie working on Michael’s part, or simply the absence of Tim’s hand in hers, Sasha isn’t sure. All she knows is the heat in her blood, the rage spilling through her like a red stain through cotton. That, and the building urge to scream.

She takes the first staircase she finds, down and down into the belly of the house. If the pathway is open to her, she figures, Michael must intend for her to follow it. Like a child in a fairytale. Her and Tim, Hansel and Gretel. Doomed to die – to be consumed – or, if they’re lucky, to tear down the witch’s evil house brick by bloody brick.

Her hands flex at her sides, curling and uncurling into fists. She thinks she’d like to do some tearing.

* * *

It’s a peal of echoing laughter that stops her in her tracks. She is standing at the mouth of a large, white-panelled kitchen, full of expensive appliances. There is a fruit bowl on the island which holds only green apples; the sort of soulless detail you might find in a home décor catalogue. Sunlight glints off of stainless steel.

Around the corner is where the laughter came from. Out of sight. Tentatively, Sasha follows it. As she passes the worktop, she spies a block of knives, wicked-sharp. She hesitates, then slips one out into her grasp.

When she rounds the corner, she freezes.

There is a dining room, as light and airy as the rest of the house, with a large table set for six. The white tablecloth is crowded with porcelain plates, little ones for bread and butter and larger ones for a meal not yet served. Intricately folded napkins, white as paper – maybe they _are_ paper – and clusters of glittering silverware. Crystal wine glasses. A cloud of white roses and baby breaths sits in a vase at the centre. And is a pitcher of orange juice, bright and shocking in the middle of it all. 

A man and a woman, middle-aged, occupy the two seats at the far end of the table. Mr and Mrs Dufresne. His glasses have a broken lens and her grey bob looks very dishevelled. They wriggle against the brightly-coloured skipping ropes which bind them, and – when they see Sasha – begin to squeak and bleat against the duct tape covering their mouths.

On their right, a little boy is seated, socked feet dangling inches from the floor. He has his head bent over a sheet of paper, and is scribbling intently with his tongue sticking out. If he notices Sasha in the doorway, he doesn’t say anything.

On their left sits Michael. It has its knees tucked up against the rung of the chair, and is leaning forward to peer at Jordan’s artwork with a curious smile, but it looks up when Jordan’s parents begin to make their fuss.

“Oh,” it says. “Sasha.”

Sasha grits her teeth and reasserts her grip on the kitchen knife. “Michael.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing like a horrible cliff-hanger to add some spice to your Saturday! I’m really excited to write the next part of this.  
> (Also, in case it wasn’t clear in the text (I know I didn’t dwell on it for long), the reason the faces on the toile de jouy were crossed out is because they wanted to make it impossible for the Eye to look in through them.)  
> The next chapter is an Intense one and I want to do it justice, so it’ll probably take a little while again. In the meantime, comments make my day, so please let me know what you thought of this!


	15. Dining Room

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Eye takes a stand against the Spiral.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this one took a while to get out! I'm currently preparing to return to Uni, so I've been very busy. Apologies, I know I left us on quite a nasty cliffhanger.
> 
> There is quite a violent scene in this chapter, I will warn you - nothing I imagine would be shocking to a TMA fan, but I wanted to let you know. It involves a knife. If you want to avoid it, it starts at "It is 2012" and ends at "long gone", where there is a line break. It's not essential for understanding the story, so you can skip it if you want.

Sasha knows that Michael has seen the knife in her hand, but it doesn’t let on. She scans its body for warning signs: for tautness around the shoulders; for wariness or dislike in its eyes. For animosity. She’s waiting for it to spring so that she can defend herself, defend the Dufresne family – or at least that’s her excuse. The waiting is like an electrical current within her, all pricking lines of tension. A thrumming in her blood.

_Go on_ , she thinks. She won’t admit it, but a part of her _wants_ it to get violent. To give her an excuse to attack, to learn what happens when you sink a knife through a body made of lies. _Go on, go on, go_ on.

Instead, it turns to the boy – all leisurely – and leans forward on sharp elbows to tap the corner of his page. The movement sparks a muffled litany of protests from his parents.

“Jordan,” it says, oblivious. “Sasha’s here. Say hello, won’t you?”

Jordan doesn’t react, too busy drawing. Michael’s face betrays no annoyance, but when it tries again – after a long pause – its ink-stained fingertip spears the paper, pinning it to the placemat underneath. “ _Jordan_. Say hello.”

With great reluctance, Jordan pries his eyes from his work and lifts his head. His hair is dark and shiny as a conker, and it falls around his face in an unfortunate bowl cut that makes him look a little like a ragdoll. “Hello,” he says, not meeting her eyes.

Sasha glances from his face – pink-cheeked, blue-eyed – to his hand, clutched in a vise around his crayon. Is he frightened? She can’t tell. There’s a tranquillity on his face, a flatness in his voice which betrays nothing – but that could just be bewilderment. Children, she knows, don’t always express their feelings the way you might expect.

“Hello, Jordan,” she tries, in her best babysitter voice. “It’s very nice to meet you.”

Jordan presses his lips together so that they vanish from his face. “She has a knife,” he tells Michael.

Michael smiles at him, which could mean almost anything, and withdraws its hand from his picture. It’s a kind smile, Sasha thinks – borrowed from Michael Shelley – but she doesn’t trust it. Not anymore. In the background, Jordan’s parents squirm.

“Yes, she does,” says Michael, placidly. “It’s alright.”

“No, it’s not.” The crayon disappears in Jordan’s clenched fist. “You said she was your friend.”

“Friends argue,” says Michael.

It eyes her cautiously as it says that, like it’s testing her. Waiting for her to disagree; to say they aren’t friends anymore; to say that this is more than a mere argument. She doesn’t. It feels like there’s something heavy and dry on her tongue, weighing it down like a stone. And all the while, that mild smile doesn’t leave its face.

Jordan shifts to face her in his chair. She catches a white flash of kneecaps above socks the grey of television static. “You should put that down,” he says. “It’s rude to wave knives at your friends.”

Sasha blinks at him. He’s taking _Michael’s_ side?

“It’s rude to steal people you promised not to steal,” she answers, with a pointed look at the monster. She doesn’t relinquish the knife.

For a moment, Michael doesn’t appear to compute. A line appears between its brows. “Steal…?” Then something must click, because it turns – with an exaggerated frown – to Jordan. “Now, Mister. What did I tell you about taking Sasha’s friends?”

Sasha splutters in surprise.

“Not to,” Jordan answers feebly.

“Spit him out,” says Michael. As if Jordan had stashed a frog in his mouth, or a snail. Any normal gross thing a seven-year-old might do.

“I _have_ ,” Jordan pouts. “He’s on the green. He can’t get back inside.”

Michael nods. “Good.”

The dots connect in Sasha’s brain slower than she would like them to. She looks from one to the other, back and forth, until she isn’t sure which figure worries her more. Michael, all crooked angles and spiralling hair. The boy, with his crayons and his bowl cut and those static-grey knee socks, which – the longer she looks – seem more and more to be flickering.

“He’s like you,” she says to Michael, when she understands. It’s not a question, but as the words leave her mouth, she hears an echo from that tape Michael so long-ago unspooled: _There is nothing like me_.

This time, Michael doesn’t repeat its refrain. Just says, “Yes.”

As if it were simple. As if that lone word wasn’t enough to make Sasha’s stomach twist.

* * *

Silence hangs heavy in the dining room until Sasha musters the courage to wade through it. “Michael,” she says, nodding back the way she came. “A word outside.”

Michael stands up panther-like, all fluid, rolling movement. “Of course.”

She tries not to take its easy co-operation as a bad sign. Nevertheless, her nerves jangle as she leads it back through the kitchen, past the pristine counters and the waxy bowl of fruit. She pauses at the knife block, considers returning the knife, but she can’t quite bring herself to let it go. Seeing her conflict, Michael laughs.

“What’s funny?” she snaps.

“Nothing! I’m just remembering the last time someone came at me with a knife.”

Without warning, Sasha, remembers it too.

It is 2012. A forty-year-old lawyer is heating soup in his tiny kitchenette, confused by all the pennies he has to keep fishing from the saucepan. There’s a small handful on the worktop beside him, sticky with minestrone. He wipes his hands on his slacks, staining the pale grey of them red. _Blood_ red, he thinks. Red as his conscience. The coins are trick coins; they all have two heads.

“Trick coins for a trick lawyer,” he mutters under his breath. When the lawyer turns to look at Michael his mouth drops open in alarm, as if Michael has two heads, too.

The lawyer has seen Michael before. It shows up at court sometimes, sitting with the jury and taking careful notes. The lawyer knows the notes are never about the trial taking place. They’re about _him_. His guilt, a secret held between them. It is compiling a document, he thinks. Building a case.

Michael knows that he is guilty; that he has done something unspeakable. He’s tried to ask it before, to pry out what the guilty deed was, because _oh_ , he can never remember – he just knows he _did it_. Michael never tells. Just smiles. But Michael definitely knows. Michael is the only one who knows.

Some calculation seems to take place behind the lawyer’s eyes in that moment. This is the first time they have shared a private room. Without warning, he grabs a knife from the draining board and drives it in below Michael’s ribs. He twists up, the way he’s read about in so many autopsy reports. Twists up, behind the bone, to pierce whatever Michael has in place of a heart.

The blade goes in easier than he had expected. No resistance from the flesh, or the facsimile of flesh. Michael gives a small, sharp cry. It has never been stabbed before.

When the lawyer draws the blade out, it’s wet and shiny with – is that _blood_?

“No,” the lawyer gasps. “No, that’s not right.”

Sasha gasps too. Watches in disbelief as Michael lifts a hand to feel at the wound.

“Oh,” it says. It licks its lips; opens its mouth; doesn’t seem able to make words.

Blood leaks out across its jumper, the stain growing fast. It isn’t wearing its coat. Somehow, that bothers Sasha more than the fact that Michael’s bleeding, until she looks over the counter and spies the coat thrown over the arm of the couch.

The lawyer casts a skittish glance at the mobile phone on his worktop, like he’s thinking about calling for an ambulance. Then he grabs Michael and stabs it again, lower this time, in the gut. Again. Again.

“No,” he says. “You can’t trick me. You’re not – you’re a _thing_.”

Michael doesn’t struggle as the wounds add up: two more to the stomach, one to the side. Just sways on the spot, limp as a doll, letting the lawyer hold it upright by the bicep as he works. The second, third, fourth wounds surprise it less. It doesn’t cry out again. Gasps softly instead, each time the blade goes in; mouth agape; blood freckling its lower lip. Until the lawyer – desperate for an inhuman reaction – lets out a frenzied shout and drives the blade in through its cheek.

Then, finally, Michael staggers back. It looks horribly human, even with the knife’s hilt still sticking out of its face. The blade was angled upward, aiming for the eye as much as the lawyer gave a thought to aim for anything. Sasha watches its sclera turn red, and suddenly, she knows how this scene will play out: how Michael had always planned for it to play out.

Michael will collapse; go still. The lawyer will stare at it for a long time before he begins to weep, realising what he has done. He will sink to the floor with Michael’s body, cradling his phone in his lap, and dial 9-9-9. They will pick up and he will whisper, “ _I’m guilty_.”

When the police arrive, they will find the kitchen awash with minestrone soup. The lawyer will be dead: an easy suicide ruling, the knife in his own chest with his hands still clutched around it. And Michael? Michael will be long gone.

* * *

Sasha drops her knife at once. It spins away across the tiles and Michael laughs again, harder.

“That’s _it_ ,” she snaps, seizing it by the arm. She drags it out of the kitchen, down the hall, stopping only when she can bear to pivot round and face it. There’s still the ghost of a smile on its lips.

“What have you done to that child, Michael?”

“Me?” It glances over its shoulder, though the dining room is long out of eyeshot. “Nothing whatsoever.”

She squeezes its bicep, hard enough to hurt a human. It doesn’t even wince.

“The truth,” she snarls.

“That _is_ the truth!”

“ _What have you done to him_?”

This time, Michael shudders. “I read to him, some evenings,” it says. “When he couldn’t sleep. He likes the _Chrestomanci_ books. But he likes to invent his own endings for them. He likes to draw, too – you’ve seen that – I taught him how to do clouds—” It claps a hand over its mouth, eyes wide and gleaming. But the words don’t stop, spilling out around its fingers. “I helped him cover up the eyes on the walls. All the ones he couldn’t reach. I made him sandwiches because Renée would never cut the crusts off. I talked to him. The Lonely wanted him. I had to keep him from the Lonely—”

With its other hand, it claws at its throat, choking itself off. Sasha lets it go and stumbles backwards, suddenly afraid to be within striking reach. It looks angry, she thinks. Furious. But then – no. There’s that glitter in its eyes, like a slapped child. Like it might cry.

When it speaks again, its voice comes thick with horror. “You Compelled me.”

“I what?”

“You _Compelled me_.”

It draws its hands over its mouth again, though it’s too late to take back what it said. Sasha realises with a little thrill that the look on its face is _fear_.

_You are danger_ , it told her once. _To yourself. To me. Your curiosity is one that_ ravages _._

She can hardly breathe. What has she done?

“What’s the Lonely?” she asks it. Just to experiment. She needs to know if she can do it again.

Michael shakes its head, trying to resist. But it can’t. It looks like it might be sick.

“One of Smirke’s fourteen,” it blurts when it reaches its limit. “Fog and silence and waiting rooms and ticking clocks and friends that will never arrive because they never really cared, perhaps they never planned to come, perhaps they’re all laughing at you and—” Terror quickens the words as they spill out of it. Sasha can see it choking on its own voice, like the truth blisters on its way out. (Maybe it does.) It flaps its hands, despair in its eyes. “And open sea and locked doors and lost property and please,” it says, “Please stop—”

She lifts a hand to indicate that she has heard enough. Michael wilts in relief, looking for all the world like she just tried to waterboard it. Its eyes have gone glossy with tears. Sasha can’t believe it. Michael, afraid? Of _her_?

At another time – a better time – she might feel guilty. But she mustn’t forget what she’s doing here. Mustn’t forget the Dufresne family, tied up in the dining room while their son descends into monsterhood before their very eyes.

“So,” she says, trying hard not to form another question, though there are so many she longs to ask. The temptation of a Michael that can’t evade her is almost too much to bear. “The Lonely lay claim to Jordan. And on behalf of the Spiral, you snatched him away.”

Michael nods jerkily.

“Why?”

“Because, because you told me,” it says. “You told me to choose, to choose bad people. And, and, and I don’t like Peter Lukas. And his parents, Jordan’s parents. They know the Lukas family. They gave them a guide, a parenting guide, and, and—” it screws up its eyes but it can’t fight the Compulsion. “It would’ve made him Lonely and, and Jordan said, he said, he said he didn’t want it. He liked, he liked the Spiral better.”

“Why are you talking like that?”

“Like what?”

“You’re stuttering.”

“I’m not,” it says, then hisses with pain at the lie. “Stop—Michael had a stutter. He – _stop it_ – he had to talk slowly, to, to manage it, to – Sasha, _stop_ —”

She lifts her hand again, breaking the spell.

“Don’t _do_ that,” it snaps.

“I’m sorry. But I need to understand, Michael. I thought you were killing them. All of them, Jordan included.”

“I _told_ you I would go after bad people,” it says. “Or at least I said I’d _try_.”

“…I didn’t think you meant it.”

In truth, Sasha thought her request had been a one-off; that it had just been indulging her after their conversation in the café. Had it been following her directions this whole time? Ruining the lives of only those it thought she would approve of? Who had it – _no_. She didn’t want to know who it had picked for her.

“I meant it,” says Michael now.

Its voice is a ghost. Sasha restrains the urge to apologise, for hurting it, for _scaring it_. There’s no point; not when she knows what she has to do next. She draws herself up, reluctance dragging her movements, and levels it with her most professional stare. “I have another question.”

“No,” it blurts. “Not again.”

“I don’t want to Compel you,” she says. “Is there – I don’t know how to avoid it.”

“Don’t ask,” says Michael. “Just don’t. That’s how.”

“But I have to ask.”

_I don’t understand_ , she had said to it, the night it gave its warning.

_And_ , it had answered, _I was not designed to be understood._

Michael dithers in the hallway, like it’s looking for a way out. Would it run from her? Does she frighten it that much? _Don’t run_ , she wants to tell it. _I’m your friend_. But how can she?

Sasha has never felt like this before. Like she has power. Like she’s _worth_ being afraid of. She knows that, if it weren’t for the Eye, she wouldn’t be. Knows that she is slipping, into the hold of something impossibly bad; something worse even, maybe, than Michael. She knows that this should worry her, but it doesn’t. It feels – shockingly – _good_.

“Fine,” Michael says at last, wiping at a fallen tear. There is frost in its voice. “Fine. Do it. But Sasha… I won’t forgive you.”

Sasha stares at it long and hard, remembering the way it felt curled against her, in her arms. The first real smile it gave her, the day she let it help carry her shopping. Its apology before it stabbed her in the arm. Its hand in hers on the beach as they ran away from waves. There’s no running this time; not from this.

She doesn’t want to lose Michael, she realises. But it was right to warn her: they are oil and water now. This thing between them – this strange, sharp-edged friendship – it was always doomed, wasn’t it? It was always going to end like this.

Gingerly, she steps forward and trails her knuckles over its cheek. It lets her. Shuts its eyes like cornered prey, resigned to the certainty of the killing strike. Its tears are iridescent on her fingers.

“It’s okay,” she says, guilt sour on her tongue. “I wouldn’t forgive me either.”

Then she asks.

* * *

“What will happen to Jordan’s parents?”

“That’s not up to me. I let Jordan decide. I suspect he’ll kill them, when he’s bored.”

“What about Renée?”

“Renée is already dead.”

“The thing that let us into the house?”

“That wasn’t her.”

“What was it?”

“A drawing.”

“Can he control everyone he draws?”

“No. It isn’t puppetry – that’s the Web’s domain. Jordan’s creatures, they’re just tricks. Illusions. Like a flip-book animation.”

“You said Smirke’s Fourteen, before. Is the Web one of them? What are the rest?”

“You know some already,” it says. “The Spiral and the Eye. The Lonely, and yes, the Web. The Stranger too.” It counts them on its hands. “There’s the Corruption. The Hunt. The Slaughter. The Dark. The Desolation; the Buried; the Vast. The Flesh. And – the End.”

Sasha nods, head spinning with new information. Maybe it’s the Beholding in her, but she thinks she catches glimpses of each entity as its name is said. Little shreds of horror. Internally, she’s re-contextualising statements, many of which suddenly make a lot more sense.

“Is that all?” says Michael, stiffly.

“No. I need you to stop Jordan from killing his parents.”

“His parents deserve it,” says Michael. “They were keeping him _locked_ in that room. They wouldn’t let him see his friends, or even _play_ , before I got here.”

“So they’re awful people,” she reasons. “Sure. I don’t disagree. But what about Jordan? If he does kill them, he won’t be able to take it back. He’ll have to live with that.”

“I can’t help you,” says Michael. Its voice is brittle.

“You mean you _won’t_ help me.”

“I think you should leave.”

“No! Why should I?”

“Because I promised not to hurt you.”

“Is that a _threat_?”

“No.” Its eyes are fearful again, but they aren’t on her. Sasha turns, following its gaze.

Jordan stands at the far end of the hall. He shouldn’t have been able to get there without crossing their path, but there he is. “Michael's right,” he says. “You should leave. Now. Because _I_ didn't promise anything.”

* * *

“Jordan,” Sasha tries. “Please, Jordan, listen to me. You don’t want this. You _really_ don’t want this.”

“Yes I do. Michael is my _friend_.”

“I know, but—”

Jordan shakes his head and speaks over her, louder. “I only didn’t kill you yet ‘cuz Michael is my friend. But I will! If you don’t leave, I will!”

“Please don’t, Jordan,” says Michael, from behind her. “It’s alright. We’re just – having a talk.” And oh, Sasha could _curse_ Michael Shelley for being such a bad liar.

“You’re fighting!” Jordan wails.

“No, we’re not.”

“I don’t like her!” Jordan throws his hands up over his ears. “I don’t like her, I don’t like her!”

Sasha wobbles on her feet, almost pitching into Michael as the corridor begins to subtly twist. Michael loops an arm around her and pulls her behind it.

“That’s _enough_ ,” it snaps at Jordan, who stamps his feet. “Leave her alone.”

“You can’t tell me what to do! You’re not my parents!”

“You _tied your parents to the dining chairs_ ,” says Michael. “I can go and get them, if you like? Will you listen then?”

Jordan drops his hands, aghast. “No! Don’t do that!”

“Why not, Jordan?”

“No! Don’t untie them! _Promise_ you won’t untie them!” He drops to his knees and clasps his hands, like a beggar in a cartoon. “Please. Promise you won’t. I’ll be good. I will.”

Michael turns to Sasha with a surprisingly gentle expression. “Go now,” it says. “I’ll look after him.”

Sasha takes a long look at Jordan, whose temper has burnt off as quickly as morning mist. All she sees now is a frightened child. Frightened because his own parents kept him locked up in a box. Because they’d do it again, given half a chance.

She feels like she should argue with Michael. Like there must be another option; a better one, a _right_ one. But she knows, with a sinking in her chest, that it’s too late. One way or the other, Jordan will be claimed by a Fear. It might as well at least be the one he likes best.

Weakly, she nods. “Okay.”

There’s already a yellow door waiting for her in the wall. She doesn’t ask Michael whether it’s safe. It seems ridiculous to put trust in it now – _I won’t forgive you_ , it said – but if this is to be its final act of kindness towards her, she doesn’t want to ruin it with a question it’s forced to answer.

“Goodbye, Michael,” she says instead.

It laughs hollowly. “I will see you again.”

_But not as my friend_ , she thinks, and leaves the manor without looking back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A word about the lawyer: I based his experience with the Spiral on false memory OCD, which is a subset of OCD that causes the sufferer to believe that they have done something horrific or illegal, despite having no proof. It can manifest from uncertainty - e.g. a memory gap created by alcohol, which the sufferer then fills in - or as a completely imagined event. If any of this rang true with you, please do look into treatment. You don't deserve to suffer alone.
> 
> That important note aside, I hope you enjoyed the chapter! It was very intense to write. (As a side note, I'm aware that when Jon Compels people it erases any difficulties they have with speaking (MAG100 addressed that, haha) - so I'm using creative leeway here to say that, because Sasha isn't the Archivist, her Compulsion isn't as strong/refined. That's my excuse for why Michael started to stutter.)
> 
> Please let me know what you thought in the comments! Reading your responses makes me so very happy.


	16. Home, Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's time for a talk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: Ah, this chapter shouldn't be too difficult! It's nice and light compared to the last three. I reckon I can get it out quickly.  
> This Chapter: *grows into the longest chapter of the fic*
> 
> This one is a bit of a monster, but, I think, with good reason. The last chapter was so chock-full of miscommunication, I had to go through with a fine-toothed comb to unpick it all. What I have for you now is 4000-odd words of healthy problem-solving. Bon Appetit.

The week after the fallout is perhaps one of the loneliest of Sasha’s life.

That’s not to say, of course, that she’s _alone_. Ever since she came stumbling out through that yellow door – landing in a heap on the manicured grass, sobs knifing their way up her throat – Tim has hardly let her out of his sight. She spent that night at his house, curled up in a blanket-ball on his squashy sofa, watching James Acaster’s _Repertoire_ until she could pretend she felt better. Every day since then, he’s brought her a coffee at her desk. Honeycomb, her favourite.

“It wasn’t your fault, Tim,” she tells him, each time he arrives with a fresh cup. “You don’t have to try and make up for it.”

And each time, his response is the same: “I just want to take care of you.”

He looks at her sometimes, with this great gaping worry in his eyes, but stops just shy of asking her what happened. Sasha knows he’s hurt by her decision to keep it secret. But she can’t tell him the truth. She can’t.

What would she say? _Hey, Tim, I’m turning into a monster. Even Michael is afraid of me._

That’s where the lonely feeling comes from. The secrecy. The knowing of a truth she cannot share. Ironic, she thinks: that the girl who tortured the truth out of her supposed friend is too much of a coward to confess it herself.

* * *

Jon asked for a statement, of course, when they got back and he took in the state of them; Tim’s knuckles, all bruised up from banging on various doors, vying for a way back inside; Sasha’s eyes, red-rimmed, and her jaw tightly set. Tim had a dark look in his eyes which suggested he would sooner pick Jon up and suplex him into the nearest wastepaper basket than give his statement. Nonetheless, Jon asked – and surprisingly, Tim sat down and gave one.

Jon’s interest spiked when he mentioned Michael.

“Did you see him?” he asked, leaning forward on his chair.

“It,” Tim corrected, and shook his head. “No. All I saw was that kid’s playroom, and that weird door that appeared in the wall facing the window.”

“Right.” Jon straightened his glasses on his nose. This was usually the moment he would make some pithy remark about delusions or substance abuse, but he could hardly accuse Tim of such things; not when he had seen him that very morning, seen how lucid he was. Not when he knew Michael was involved.

“It’s too bad,” said Tim, leaning back in his chair. He gave Sasha what was meant to be a reassuring look, though Sasha didn’t feel like she deserved it. “If I _had_ run into the thing, it would’ve got an elbow to the face.”

“Sasha,” Jon interrupted, smoothly running over that comment. “What happened to you while Tim was trapped in the playroom? Did _you_ encounter… it?”

Sasha gripped the seat of her chair and forced herself to remain tight-lipped. He hadn’t Compelled her, but – she reasoned – if _she_ could do it, he _definitely_ could. Her mouth stayed firmly closed, even when Jon told her it wouldn’t take long. Even when he told her they could keep the tape-recorder off, or that she could write it down instead.

It was guilt, she thought. Her guilt, and the terror that – even though she spoke nothing but truth – he would give her one of those withering looks, like salt in all her wounds, like he didn’t believe her. She couldn’t have Jon look at her like that when she told him about the Spiral; the Eye. Couldn’t have him look at her like that, period.

Sensing that speaking – even to refuse – would lead her to start spilling her guts, she stayed utterly silent until the mood in the room grew close and tense.

“Lay off her,” said Tim, after a few minutes of Jon’s gentle pestering. “We’ve barely been back an hour. She’s clearly upset.”

Sasha shook her head. “It’s fine. I’m fine. Maybe – maybe later.”

“Of course,” said Jon, reluctantly.

With that, she got up and left.

She’s not an idiot. She knows she can’t put off a statement forever. But she plans keep delaying it for as long as she possibly can.

* * *

“Did we ever find out who keyed Elias’s car?” Tim asks, one morning in the breakroom, over his raspberry yoghurt. It’s just the three assistants in there, as Jon has been summoned to speak with Elias about the extra fire extinguishers they’re finally installing. Every now and then, Tim will find a mostly-whole raspberry and offer it to Sasha on the spoon. She keeps them on her tongue until they melt.

Martin shakes his head; swallows a mouthful of sandwich. “Don’t think so.”

“Elias would’ve filed a report, though, right?” Tim reasons. “If there was CCTV footage—”

_It would’ve been scrambled_ , Sasha thinks, and then blinks in surprise. She realises she knows who keyed the car. Or rather, _what_ did. The realisation startles a laugh from her throat. It’s the first time she’s laughed since the incident at the manor.

“Oh, nothing,” she excuses, when Tim and Martin stare at her in confusion. “I’m just remembering the look on Elias’s face.”

They laugh too, then.

Later that night, she remembers and laughs again. But this time, with no-one around to see her, the laugh quickly breaks into a sob.

* * *

It’s Wednesday night – a full week since she found herself camped out at Tim’s – and Sasha’s alone in her flat, stirring a saucepan of milk for hot chocolate, when there comes a knock at the door.

The knock is timid and careful, so quiet she thinks she might’ve imagined it. She stills her spoon and listens. It comes again, louder: _tap-tap-tap_. This time, she rounds the counter and creeps over to the door, long wooden spoon gripped tightly in her hand.

It’s not often that she gets an unexpected visitor. There’s Michael, but Michael rarely knocks. Knocking would give her the chance to reject it, and – while it’s never outright said it fears rejection – she senses it would prefer to avoid the prospect. It prefers instead to loiter on her stairwell, as if it just so happened to be there and Sasha’s presence is pure coincidence. That way, it can accept her invitation like it hadn’t planned to visit in the first place. If she doesn’t extend an invitation, no harm done.

And if it _really_ wants to see her, it will simply be waiting in her flat when she gets home. As if it lives there. _Lived_ there, she reminds herself. It doesn’t do that anymore.

_Tap-tap-tap_ , again.

The spoon shakes in Sasha’s hand. She fights the urge to grab a better weapon. It’s almost 1am. If this _isn’t_ Michael, she dreads to think who else it might be, waiting out there in the dark.

“Who’s there?” she asks, and glances out through the peephole.

She can’t see anyone on the other side. An invisible guest?

“Sasha,” comes a voice. “Please open.”

Sasha swings the door wide. “ _Jordan_?”

Sure enough, the seven-year-old boy is huddled on her welcome mat. He’s wearing a rumpled private-school uniform and there’s a bag slung over his shoulder. “May I come in?”

* * *

“What are you _doing_ here?”

“I wanted to see you.”

“Does Michael know you’re out this late?”

“No. I waited until it was gone.”

“How did you even _get_ here? From _Oxford_?”

“Taxi.”

Sasha imagines it: Jordan huddling down in bed, pretending to be asleep until the coast was clear; getting dressed again and sculpting his pyjamas into a human-shaped mound under the blankets. Creeping out of the house and down the driveway, eyes peeled for any shadow that might look out-of-place, until he reached a street where he could hail a taxi. The driver would’ve been bemused to see a boy so young travelling alone at night – but then, the Spiral would take care of that, wouldn’t it? Sasha remembers the waiter in Essaouira who handed her a cup of tea she hadn’t ordered without a second thought.

“Would you like me to go?” Jordan asks. He’s looking up at her dejectedly through his eyelashes, like a puppy.

Sasha shakes her head and ushers him inside. “No, no, don’t be silly! I’m not kicking you out at _this_ time of night!” She marches over to the kitchenette and wrenches open the fridge. “Do you like hot chocolate?”

A timid nod.

Sasha grabs the milk and splashes more into the saucepan. Then she fetches down an extra mug. “Come and sit on the sofa,” she says. “Get your shoes off, get comfy. I’ll make you up a bed in a minute, but first I’d like to know what’s going on.”

* * *

Jordan doesn’t speak again until the mug is clasped between his hands. His fingers look tiny curled around the porcelain. Sasha waits as patiently as she can, sipping chocolate from her own mug every time she feels the urge to nudge him. When he’s ready, he bows his head and speaks into the chocolate-scented steam.

“I think I upset Michael.”

Sasha sets her mug down on the coffee table. “Oh? How so?”

“It’s sad,” Jordan says, and shrugs a little helplessly. “It pretends it’s not, but I can tell. When it thinks I’m busy drawing, it drops its smile and stares out the window. It looks – like it’s in pain. Like it stood on something sharp without its shoes on.”

Sasha doesn’t have to imagine it. As easily as looking at a photograph, she sees what Jordan has been seeing all week; the listless look in Michael’s eyes; the little frowns tugging at the corners of its mouth. She hears its echoing laugh but there’s something wrong with it, like a chord that’s missing a note. Jordan sighs heavily.

“Why would that be _your_ fault?” Sasha asks him.

“I told you to go away,” he laments. “You’re its friend. It misses you.”

“No,” says Sasha. “Don’t apologise for that, Jordan. You were right to send me out. I was in your home and I was making you upset. No-one should do that.”

“But—”

“No. If anyone ever makes you feel uncomfortable in your own space, you tell them very firmly to leave, okay? You don’t put up with it. You tell them to leave, just like you told me.” She gives Jordan what she hopes is a very serious look. “I was in the wrong. And I am very sorry.”

She feels much better when the words are out. She hadn’t realised, until now, just how much her behaviour towards Jordan had been weighing on her. Spiral avatar or otherwise, he’s just a little boy and he didn’t deserve to have a stranger force her way into his space and start a fight with one of his carers. (Even if, at the time, she hadn’t really known that Michael was his carer.)

Jordan looks like he’s considering something. He blows on his drink while he thinks. “Okay,” he says at last, and takes a slurp from the mug. “I forgive you.”

“And you won’t put up with any nonsense?”

“And I won’t put up with any _nonsense_ ,” he says. Like any normal seven-year-old, he seems to take particular glee in the word _nonsense_ – either because it sounds good, or because of what it implies.

“What about _malarkey_?” says Sasha, to test him. “Or perhaps a _ruckus_?”

“Absolutely not!” He sets down his mug and folds his arms like a crotchety old man, but the corners of his mouth curl up. “I won’t put up with any _malarkey_ or _ruckus_ in my house.”

“Tomfoolery?”

“No! No tomfoolery at all.”

“What about… _shenanigans_?”

“Never!” he declares. “Not under _my_ roof!”

Giggles interrupt him. He has to clutch his sides. Sasha can’t help but feel relieved to see him laughing, especially over something so ordinary and childish. Without meaning to, she knows that Michael felt the same relief, the first time it managed to make Jordan laugh.

It was early in their acquaintance. The boy had been shut up in his bedroom – far away from his crayons and his toys – though he’d managed to smuggle one dark green stub up his sleeve. He was drawing careless squiggles on the wall when Michael strolled in through a door that wasn’t there.

“You look miserable,” it said. “If you don’t stop frowning, the wind will change and your face will _stay_ like that.”

Jordan frowned harder.

“Oh, you’re stubborn,” said Michael. But Michael was stubborn too.

First, it sat on the floor with him and told him it had switched the salt and sugar in the pots downstairs. “Your mum is going to be very confused when she makes her tea,” it said. But Jordan didn’t laugh. It tried again: “If you like, I can sneak up on your dad while he’s reading the paper and tie his shoelaces together. Then I can make a noise, maybe drop some pans in the kitchen, so he has to get up in a hurry – he would fall flat on his face!” Michael mimed it with sweeping gestures. Nothing. “Maybe I can chase the gardener away and mess up the topiaries?” (It _did_ do that, in the end, but weeks later, and Jordan came to help.)

Eventually, Michael tried to “impress” him with a handstand, failing on purpose in a way that looked very silly. Jordan knew it was pretending – it could probably do a very good handstand if it wanted – but the way it flailed off-kilter was funny nonetheless, and he couldn’t stifle his spluttering laugh. Michael hit the carpet in a sickening tangle of limbs, but righted itself at once when it heard him.

“There,” it said. “That’s better.”

And Michael had been his friend after that.

* * *

It’s with a pang that Sasha remembers why Jordan came here tonight. _It’s sad_ , he said, more gravely than she had ever heard a child say anything. _It misses you_.

“You want me to make up with Michael,” she says, when Jordan has finished laughing at the word _shenanigans_. It isn’t a question.

Jordan sits up and nods. “Please.”

She imagines going to Michael and saying sorry. Asking its forgiveness after she put such a stricken look on its face. _I will never forgive you_ , it had said – its voice tinged with pre-empted loss. It had given her a choice between itself and the Eye, which, of course, was no choice at all. And it had known that. It hadn’t expected better of her. Did that inevitability, she wonders, make her betrayal sting more or less?

“I can’t,” she says, and clasps her hands together.

“Why not?”

“Because I hurt it, didn’t I?” The backs of her eyes burn with tears, but she doesn’t let them fall. Adults, she remembers from her childhood, are scary when they cry in front of you. They’re meant to be unshakeable. She doesn’t want to scare Jordan like that. “I said terrible things,” she continues. “Broke its trust. I have no right to a clean slate.”

Jordan ponders. Then says, almost in Michael’s voice, “Friends argue.”

And _oh_ , it hurts to hear those words again.

“Not like that,” says Sasha. “Never like that.”

“Please,” Jordan wheedles. “I don’t know what to do.” He puts his hand on her knee and the touch is like static. “Please, Sasha.” He must have run out of arguments. But she sees how desperate he is. “Please, please, _please_!”

Sasha sighs. “Alright.” Jordan lights up at that. She ploughs on firmly before he can exclaim his relief. “If Michael wants to talk, I’ll talk. I’ll tell it I’m sorry, because I am. But if it doesn’t want to see me, then there’s nothing I can do.”

“It will,” says Jordan, nodding slightly too fast. “It wants to see you. It will.”

“Just… Jordan. Don’t be disappointed if this doesn’t turn out how you’d like.”

* * *

When their hot chocolates are drunk, Sasha brings out pillows and a spare duvet from the airing cupboard, to transform the sofa into a makeshift bed.

“Now, I’m afraid I don’t have any pyjamas in your size,” she says. “Did you pack your own?”

Jordan shakes his head, as if the thought that he might have need for nightwear is novel to him. His bag, when he shows her, is crammed full with packets of salted pistachios. “I needed snacks for the journey,” he says when he sees her expression. As if it’s obvious. “ _Midnight_ snacks.”

Sasha smiles then. She remembers being little and thinking that eating past her bedtime was the coolest, most extraordinary act of mischief in the world. In the end, she finds one of Tim’s t-shirts in her drawer, emblazoned with a cartoon robot. It fits Jordan like a nightie, but it covers his shoulders well enough and he doesn’t trip on the hem, so it will have to do.

“Comfy?” she asks, once he’s burrowed into the bed.

He nods. “Story now?”

It’s 2am at this point, but Sasha figures she may as well indulge him. She sits on the coffee table and reads aloud from _The NeverEnding Story_ – the only children’s book in her flat – until his eyes flutter shut and his breaths go soft and steady. She can’t resist the impulse to smooth down his fringe.

“Goodnight, little monster,” she says, getting up to turn off the lamp. “Sleep tight.”

Jordan whispers back, barely conscious: “Don’t let the bed-bugs bite.”

* * *

She wakes again at twenty past three, with the distinct feeling that something isn’t right. In the living room, she hears a scuffling, quiet enough that she might roll over and ignore it if it wasn’t for the child in her care. Immediately she’s up, drawing a cardigan over her bare shoulders as she creeps towards the door. She wishes she wasn’t in pyjamas. Wishes, again, that she was armed. A bad feeling is singing through her, jellying her legs.

When she peeks out into the living room, she sees what’s wrong at once. Jordan is still asleep – still wrapped in the blanket, like a big, lumpy cocoon – but he isn’t on the sofa anymore. Michael has scooped him up and is holding him in its lanky arms, as if he weighs no more than a kitten.

“Sasha.” In the dark, its outline is frightening. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m taking Jordan home.”

Sasha steps further into the room, trying to fight the panic punching through her. She isn’t scared for Jordan, nor for herself, really. It’s a desperate, aimless panic: the panic of saying the wrong thing; of letting this moment slip past, when it could be her last chance.

“I would have taken the train with him,” she says, when nothing better springs to mind. “In the morning.”

Michael _hm_ s. Without seeing its face, she can’t tell what it makes of her. Whether it misses her more than it resents her. How angry it still is. “Well, _now_ ,” it says, “you don’t have to.”

Sasha feels small and foolish in her pyjama vest and shorts. She pulls her cardigan closer, like it will hide more than her body; like it will hide her guilt, her shame. “Michael…”

The door of her fridge has disappeared. In its place is Michael’s, which looks cold and unfriendly in the gloom, when she can’t see the yellow of it. Before she can find the words to make it stay, it crosses the room in three long strides. The door swings wide. Michael steps through, taking the bundle of Jordan away with it.

Sasha isn’t stupid enough to ask it to wait for her. Instead, her body does the only desperate thing it can: it follows. She springs over the threshold into Jordan’s bedroom just as Michael is setting him down, plumping up the pillows around his little head. Jordan murmurs through layers of sleep: “’hind you.”

At that, Michael’s silhouette straightens. It doesn’t turn to face her. When it speaks, its voice is sharp. “Sasha. Go back.”

“Do you know why Jordan came to me?” she tries.

“I can guess. Go back, _now_.”

That’s her answer, then, she thinks. It doesn’t want her. She knew this was coming, but tears spring to her eyes nonetheless. She was stupid to hope for more from it. Stupid and selfish. That’s children for you, she berates herself; their hope is as infectious as it is naïve. She backtracks into the frame of the door, bare heels just grazing the wood at its threshold.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts, because she can’t bear not to say it.

Michael ignores her in favour of bending back down, tucking the blankets around Jordan’s chin. “In the morning,” it tells him softly, “we’ll be having words about running away.”

Jordan mumbles, “Talk to her.”

“I will.” It plants a kiss on his forehead. “Now go to sleep.”

Hope flares anew in Sasha’s chest as Michael turns and approaches. Wrestling it down is like trying to catch a butterfly with an overlarge net. She hadn’t expected it to humour Jordan’s wishes, but apparently it is. She doesn’t say a word as it takes her by the arm and steers her through the door.

Back in her apartment, it loses some of its gentle air. The nails-which-aren’t-nails dig in, perhaps accidentally, feeling like the rusted head of a rake. “I was always going to talk to you,” it says, too languidly for that sharp grip. “But first I wanted to put Jordan to bed. He gets grumpy without proper sleep.”

Sasha nods. The words are thick as sludge in her throat, but there’s nothing for it; she has to get them out, now, before it changes its mind and leaves.

“I’m so sorry, Michael,” she starts. Michael hovers silently beside her in the dark, impossible to read. “I’ve been thinking about what happened at the manor all week, and – I feel _sick_. What I did to you… it wasn’t acceptable. Even if I needed the answers. I should’ve found another way.” She pauses for breath, tries to slow herself, though the words are coming landslide-fast now she’s got them going. “This isn’t an excuse for my behaviour, but – I’m sure you noticed – I’d never Compelled anyone before. That was the first time. I had no idea that that was something I could do. The power… was a lot to process, and it came to me when I was desperate enough to use it without thinking.” Not for the first time, she wonders whether that was deliberate. Whether the Eye took advantage of her desperation, because it wanted to shake her and Michael apart. She clears her throat. “It felt like a shortcut. An obvious solution. Now, though, I’ve had plenty of time to think. And I regret it. A lot.”

“I understand,” says Michael.

“You do?”

“Of course. It’s easy to forget, because you generally handle things so well, but you’re still so new to all of this.” The lilt in its voice almost sounds like pity. She registers it as a cat’s tail curling around her leg. Then it continues, and the cat’s tail morphs into a scorpion’s. The barb is delivered with that same pity, but still sinks deep. “New monsters are always such a mess.”

“Is that what I am?” Sasha asks it. “A monster?”

“What _else_ would you be?”

It’s right, of course. With powers like hers – which, while nifty, carry the potential to do so much harm – there’s really not a lot to separate her from something like Michael. Only the fact that she doesn’t rely on her powers to sustain herself, she thinks – but then – _no_. When was the last time she ate something? She made herself hot chocolate, but that was just a routine; more for comfort than for thirst. She drank Tim’s gifted coffees; ate the raspberries he offered her… but did she ever buy lunch?

Nausea rolls through her as she thinks about the last time she felt full. It was outside the manor, with Tim’s hand on her back, rubbing circles there. Right after she had, so ravenously, torn Michael’s truths from its throat.

“…I guess we _both_ get cruel when we’re hungry,” she says shakily. And shocks herself by bursting into tears.

* * *

This time, it’s Michael’s turn to hold her while she cries. It does so without reservation, without reluctance, as if there was never any chance of it failing to forgive her. Sasha melts against it. Distantly, she remembers a time when she was afraid of the thing that dwelled on her stairs. Nervous to be within an arm’s width of it. How that Sasha’s jaw would drop, if she could see herself now. See them together. Monsters, plural.

Even once she’s cried herself out, she lingers in its arms. It feels nice just to stand there, taking gulpy breaths, with its chin on top of her head. Slowly, gently, it ruffles her hair with its strange jagged hands.

“How’s this for a deal?” it says. “An amendment of our previous agreement. As long as we are friends, I promise to abstain from eating your colleagues and your family. But in return, I would like for _you_ promise to abstain from Compelling me.”

“That sounds fair,” says Sasha. Her voice comes out watery. She pulls back to look it in the eyes, intending to thank it for its forgiveness. What comes out instead is, “I love you.”

Michael blinks at her. Its eyes still sparkle strangely, even in the dark; full of flickering rainbow colours. She covers its mouth with a hand. “You don’t have to say anything back.”

Very deliberately, Michael draws her hand away. “I love you,” it says. And Michael Shelley is such an awful liar that she knows this is the truth.

When it leans in to bump their foreheads together, it feels more intimate than any kiss. Sasha shuts her eyes and presses closer, mapping its shape against the arch of her brow, the bridge of her nose. She tries to speak, but the words stick to the roof of her mouth like glue. The space between their mouths is full of shared air and silence she can’t break. Instead, she thinks louder, hoping it somehow understands what she wants to convey: _I will never hurt you on purpose again_.

It sighs as if it does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this! It was really important to me that Sasha and Michael - even being, uh, monsters - talked out their issues in a sensible, mature way. Especially regarding Jordan. Initially, I wasn't even going to have him make another appearance after the house, but I felt guilty leaving things where they were so I had to bring him back.
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts below; it spurs me on like nothing else! And have a good week.


	17. Wells' Fireworks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha pays a visit to an abandoned fireworks factory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I'd like to apologise for the sheer amount of time this chapter took me. It's been - what - a fortnight since the last update? Normally I'm much faster with these, but Uni has been kicking my ass lately. Also, my old friend Anxiety decided to pay me a visit and hasn't let me sleep without heart palpitations for a week!
> 
> ...But I got here in the end. Thank you to everyone who left lovely comments on the last chapter; your words really helped spur me on. I hope you enjoy this one, though it's decidedly less fluffy.
> 
> Trigger warnings for fire.

When the sun rises, Sasha wishes more than anything that she could roll over to the cold side of the bed and unplug her alarm. Instead, with a groan, she drags herself up and forces herself through the motions of brewing morning coffee. One mug for now, another to take on her commute. She’s so sleepy that, when she goes to get milk, she almost misses the arrangement of letters on her fridge door:

_g0oD MOrnInG SaShA_

_Oh._ She hadn’t realised Michael could be sappy. The thought of it standing out here after it bid her goodnight, playing with the fridge magnets for her to find in the morning – not to warn her of anything, this time, but just to be sweet – makes her grin like an idiot. She messes up the letters of her name and replaces them with the letters for Michael, just in case it comes back later on and sees them.

Then, she hesitates and messes up the whole sentence. She has a better idea.

Satisfied with her handiwork, she sits down to knock back her coffee, then heads to the bathroom for a five-minute shower. She dresses in smart ochre trousers and a spotty white blouse, to try and disguise the tired aura she can feel radiating out of her. If she looks smart, she reasons, no-one will look at her too closely. (No-one except Tim, who always pays attention to her, but that’s a problem for future Sasha.)

At least – she thinks as she heads out – it’s a _good_ kind of tired. She feels much lighter, much more relaxed than she would’ve with a full night’s rest, had last night never happened. Michael is her friend again. Boarding the tube, she remembers the way it pressed their foreheads together. The way they stood with closed eyes, their lashes fluttering together, two predators trusting each other not to bite. Sasha had yawned when they pulled away and it had asked if she was tired. She told it yes. When she said that, it led her back to her room. She followed.

On a normal evening, Michael would be long-gone by the time she changed into her pyjamas; long-gone by the time she crawled into bed. She didn’t understand why, tonight, it had chosen to walk her here – but Michael was nothing if not inconsistent.

“Are you going to tell me a bedtime story?” she asked it, with a hiccup of sleepy laughter in her voice.

Michael laughed back. “I could,” it said. “But I think the Eye would enjoy that rather too much for my liking.”

Instead, it drew the duvet up to her chin. The night wasn’t a cold one, but she let it. No-one had tucked her in for years. When it bent to kiss the top of her head, like it had for Jordan, she almost wasn’t surprised. Almost. The kiss felt – like everything else about Michael – weird. She likened it to the sensation of leaning up against a radiator for too long; a light burn that didn’t quite hurt.

“I’ll see you soon?” she asked as it drew back.

To which it answered: “I hope so.”

They hadn’t made plans, of course – there could be no plans, with the Spiral – but, disembarking at Victoria Station, Sasha doesn’t doubt that their next meeting will be soon. The thought buoys her as she weaves her way to the Magnus Institute, crossing busy streets and ducking under awnings to hide from the lightly spitting rain.

Perhaps on a different day, she’d take rain in late July as an omen.

But today she is happy, so she doesn’t.

* * *

Jon finds her almost as soon as she makes it through the door. He’s in boss-mode, as Tim calls it: clearing his throat too much; making a forcible effort to straighten his spine. His eyes say _friend_ but his mouth says, “Can I have a word?”

She still has one arm in her jacket, which makes it awkward to have a stiff, professional conversation – the type she expects is imminent. Nonetheless she nods. “Sure, what’s up?”

She’s expecting him to ask again for her statement. Instead, he says, “I have a job for you. Apologies, I know it’s last-minute.”

“Shoot.”

“The thing is, with Martin hiding out from Prentiss – we’re down to you and Tim in the field. And Tim’s not with us today. Elias summoned him to do some _extra training_ , whatever that means.”

“So you need to send me out,” Sasha finishes. “That’s alright. Where?”

Jon’s face is pinched, which worries her for a moment, before she remembers that Jon gets that look over the tiniest of things. Things like finding a pen uncapped when “it could dry the ink out!”, or the dilemma of whether “warmly” is too intimate a sign-off for an email. The biggest gasp she ever heard him make came the time he learned that Martin doesn’t back up his laptop.

When the pause has lasted too long, she fights the urge to nudge him. If he wasn’t in boss-mode, she would. Instead, she says, “Come on. What is it?”

Now he cringes. “You remember the statement we received, regarding the abandoned fireworks factory in Dartford?”

Of course, she remembers it. For any normal office employee, the words _field work_ followed by _abandoned fireworks factory_ should’ve inspired vague feelings of distress. But Tim’s eyes had lit up at the first mention of it. Lit up – ironically – like fireworks. “Ooh, _spooky_ ,” he’d said, just to make Jon wrinkle his nose. They’d been waiting for a lull in their schedule to go and check it out, both of them, together with their notebooks. But the situation with Prentiss had waylaid them, and she realises now that it’s been well over a month since they last even mentioned the place.

“You want me to go there?” she clarifies. “By myself?”

“It’s not ideal,” says Jon. “I’ll admit.”

“Tim’s gonna be disappointed.”

“I know. I wanted to wait, but I got word from Elias that they’re demolishing it soon. The end of this week, in fact. I need you to go now, before they tear the place to shreds.”

“Can’t we go tomorrow? If we have until the end of the week?”

She doesn’t like to argue with Jon, but it seems unfair to strip the opportunity from Tim if there’s any chance they can work on it together.

From the tight grimace Jon gives her, he feels just as wrong-footed about it as she does. But that doesn’t stop him from saying, “No.” He clears his throat for the umpteenth time. “Elias has him booked all week. Why he chose _this_ week of all weeks is beyond me, but I’m not about to question it.”

Sasha nods. “I guess it can’t be helped.”

She doesn’t blame Jon, of course, but she’s disappointed too. She shrugs her coat back on, deciding that – at the very least – she can snap some cool pictures for him.

* * *

En route to the factory, Sasha begins to feel nervous.

The rocking motion of the train does little to help. She clutches her bag in her lap, fiddling with the straps, wishing more than anything that she had Tim at her side.

It’s not like she hasn’t investigated solo before, and – compared to checking up on statement-givers – documenting a location for the record is easy work. All she has to do is trudge around for an hour, taking pictures of everything she sees, and follow the path the statement-giver took as closely as she can, to check it matches. The trouble is that this statement is a Desolation statement. There can be no doubt about that; not from reading the file. Last month, Sasha wouldn’t have known it. She had been a pawn to the Eye, even then, but hardly enough of one for her presence at the site to matter. But now she knows it all, and dread pools in her stomach at the prospect of what she might find. Or – she shudders – what might find _her_.

She really wishes she’d said something to Jon.

* * *

As it turns out, the remnants of _Wells’ Fireworks_ are far less impressive than she had been expecting. Far from a tall, looming concrete monolith, what greets her at the far end of the Dartford Marshes amounts to little more than a series of overgrown, rusting corrugated sheds. Purple-flowered buddleias burst through half-collapsed roofs like mushroom clouds.

It makes sense, of course. No-one would build an entire fireworks factory in one place: if one part of it went up, the rest would follow, and the whole business would go _kaboom_. Better to space out the buildings and keep them small. Part of Sasha is relieved. Another part of her is frustrated, because there are lots of thick weeds to tramp through and she didn’t bring anything to hack at them with.

The man who gave the statement on this place – an urban explorer in his late twenties – said that he went in around the south side, so that’s what Sasha does, too. The path he took will almost certainly have fallen prey to weeds by now, but she hopes there might still be impressions of it.

She’s craning her neck to stare at the peeling red paint on a corrugated roof when she begins to feel it: a creeping, prickling heat, just like the statement described. Her whole body goes taut. There is someone behind her in the undergrowth. She knows it without seeing it. The thought keeps her from turning around, as if refusing to look will keep it from becoming real.

“Interesting,” comes a voice, as sweet and napalm-sticky as melting sugar. “I thought there’d be more of you, snooping around. Don’t eyes usually come in pairs?”

Now, Sasha turns. There is a woman watching her. Short and compactly built, with close-cropped hair and a torn black vest, she would look quite at home at a motorcycle rally. She stands at a slouch, thumbs threaded through her beltloops, beside the metal fence, which – in her presence – has begun to sweat. She’s outside of striking range, for now, but Sasha knows it would be foolish to assume that makes her safe.

She clears her throat, hard. “And you are?”

“Jude Perry.” The woman steps forward with a crackling noise that seems louder than the noise a trampled weed should make. A chemical tang fills the air as she draws closer. Cordite. “I’m here to melt your face.”

Sasha holds her ground, scouring her mind for a quip to return with. There has to be something she can say. Anything to make her sound brave; to make her sound collected; to make her sound _worth sparing_. But her mouth and throat have gone dry. She is – she realises, all of a sudden – very thirsty.

Jude snickers. “That’s your cue to run.”

It’s no use, Sasha thinks: her words aren’t working. She’s out of options.

She runs.

* * *

The problem with an untended marshland in July: the plants bake under the sun, until they’re dry and crispy as kindling. A minute ago, Sasha had been thinking that a good thing; it was easier to trample over dead plants than live ones. She hadn’t considered – for some moronic reason – that, when investigating a Desolation statement, you might want to be as far away from flammable matter as possible.

Jude tears through the bushes after her, at times – it seems – deliberately slowing, just to laugh and gain on her again. What’s the rush? Sasha is stranded, trapped in a maze of rotting beams and towering weeds. No matter where she runs, she won’t make it far enough. And – out here, in the marshland – no-one will hear her scream for help.

Three heart-thudding minutes fly past before the inevitable happens. Sasha’s ankle catches on a whip-like stalk and she trips. Falls. Her face hits metal, opening a gash above her eyebrow. Her hands find purchase on the earth and she forces herself to skitter left, like an insect on her butt, away from the corrugated wall before Jude can melt it down on top of her.

“It’s alright, Sasha,” says Jude – and Sasha winces at the sound of her own name when she hasn’t freely given it. Someone must know about her – must’ve sold her out – but who? And _why_? Jude’s smile twists meanly, like she knows what Sasha’s thinking. “Don’t get up.”

Something in the undergrowth goes _crunch_.

Jude turns. “Oh? What’s this – two eyes after all?”

Sasha tries, but she can’t get a glimpse of whoever has been sneaking up on them. The air around them is shimmering with heat. All she can see clearly is Jude; the defined lines of her shoulders; the tendrils of a full-back tattoo peeking out from underneath her vest. She hasn’t even broken a sweat.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” Jude coos. Later, if Sasha survives, she will groan at the cliché of it. “Don’t be scared. I’ll kill her first, if you like. You can watch!”

Sasha makes fists in the scrubby grass around her – and gasps when her fingers find a doorknob. Against the heat of everything else, it’s shockingly, blissfully cool. She could weep at the feel of it, but reins herself in, not wanting to give herself away. The door has been set into the cracked earth around her, almost entirely hidden beneath a scattering of soil and dead foliage. It’s her salvation, if she can get through it. But how to open it without alerting Jude?

“Come on, don’t be a _baby_ ,” Jude goads. “I know you’re here. I can hear you _rustling_.” She has turned fully now, hands on hips as she scans the factory’s wreck. But she could turn back in a blink, and Sasha has never known Michael’s door to open silently. “I don’t like hide-and-seek,” Jude continues. “I guess I’ll have to – _heh_ – smoke you out…”

She begins to prowl forward, the movement so exaggerated it’s almost a pantomime. Slowly, slowly. It would be funny if Sasha couldn’t feel the adrenaline tearing through her; if her heart weren’t beating fit to explode. With held breath, she watches her disappear around a bend, waiting until every part of her is out of sight. Her elbow is the last to vanish. _Now_ , she thinks, and rolls off of the door, dragging it open in the same movement. She means to roll back over it, down into safety, but then—

“ _Found_ you,” says Jude.

Sasha hears a yelp. A struggle. Michael’s voice, deceptively human, playing archival assistant once again: “Wait, no, _wait_ —”

For a moment, Sasha thinks it _meant_ to be captured; that this is all a part of its distraction. But then the two of them come whirling back around the corner and Sasha knows that things have gone horribly wrong.

Jude has it by the hair. A thick lock of it wrapped twice around her fist, close to the skull, and smouldering as if caught in a pair of curling tongs. Her grip would make a human scream. Michael, to its credit, yowls in anger instead. Sasha watches it claw at her, struggling to stand, but its sharp hands don’t seem able to touch Jude long enough to cut her; she burns too hot. She drags it through the grass, so low to the ground it has to stagger and crawl. And all the while, she’s laughing.

The laughter sparks darkly in Sasha’s gut.

“Oh! You’re not one of theirs, are you?” Jude ponders aloud.

Sasha wants to throw herself between them and claw Jude’s eyes out of her face. She wants to move – to do anything, anything – but she can’t. Her legs have locked into place, where she kneels beside the open door. Why does she always freeze when she’s afraid?

“No…” Jude goes on. She presses a finger to her lip in faux-thought and Sasha rages to think that she’s holding Michael one-handed. That it’s weak enough beside her to be so easily subdued. “You’re not even a _person_ , are you? Are you with the Stranger? One of those weird little dolls?”

“Let go of it,” says Sasha, surprising herself.

Jude splutters a laugh. “Or what? You’ll run to its defence and melt your hands off?”

“Sasha,” Michael manages. “Go.”

She can’t see its face with so much hair falling in the way of it, but its voice is thin and frail. Jude kicks it in the ribs – hard – and it _whimpers_.

“No,” Sasha grits out. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Adorable,” says Jude. “What an odd alliance, the Stranger and the Eye…”

She goes to do something – perhaps drag it upright so that she can look it in the eyes – but Michael chooses that moment to surge forward, pushing off her with an elbow to the face. Jude shouts. The tug-of-war makes her lose her grip, and for a moment, she flounders. But she’s quick to change tactics, throwing herself forward in a tackle. Sasha watches helplessly as they collide. There’s a smell in the air like melting plastic; like fresh paint; like a microwave exploding. Michael falls bodily against the earth, and Jude – all momentum – goes tumbling over it. Through the door.

“Close it!” Michael shrieks.

And Sasha can move again.

The two of them drag the door shut, like a lid onto a coffin, while Jude wars against them with curses and fists. “ _Spiral_!” she roars. “Fucking _Spiral_! Of _course_ it is!”

She flings out an arm, which catches in the doorframe at a horrible angle. Sasha stamps on her hand, forgetting for a moment what Jude’s skin can do. She feels it a moment later, as the sole of her brogue starts to bubble. But it doesn’t matter, because Jude’s fingers are broken and her arm is slipping, losing purchase, falling out of sight. The door slams in her wake. And the two of them are left kneeling there in the dirt beside it, breathing hard.

* * *

“Take off your shoe,” is the first thing Michael says.

Sasha obeys. The sole is a gooey mess, but mercifully, it hasn’t melted all the way through. She won’t need to visit A&E. The sight of the ruined shoe, though – and the smell of the burnt rubber – make her stomach turn. If Michael hadn’t been here… she shudders to think.

“You saved my life. Again.”

Michael dips its head in a nod. It doesn’t answer, though, which troubles her. She stares at it, trying to catch sight of its face from beneath its mess of hair. The strands blackened by Jude’s touch have already vanished, as if she never laid a hand on it to begin with. But despite that, it doesn’t look okay. It’s hunched at a weird angle and still hasn’t looked up to meet her eyes.

“Michael?” she tests it.

Nothing. If she looks hard enough, she thinks she can see it drawing breaths. Gingerly, she leans in and pats it on the shoulder. “ _Michael_?”

This time, it shivers. “Sasha. You should… go home.”

She glances down, meaning to look at the door, but when her eyes find the place where it had been, it has already vanished. Where moments before, they had been wrestling with a living fireball, there now sits only a dandelion in a patch of tufty grass. She looks back to Michael. It’s sitting very still, doing that thing it does where it seems to freeze in space, but its eyes – its eyes are darting – and its lips – its lips are parted. It still looks very afraid.

Abruptly, Sasha registers two things. The first: that Jude was able to burn Michael’s hair, despite it barely being real hair to begin with. The second: that Michael just _swallowed her_.

“Michael,” she asks it, cautiously. “What happened to Jude?”

“You saw what happened,” it says, without moving its mouth.

“But where is she now? Did you spit her out?”

It doesn’t answer.

“Michael? _Where is she now_?”

Its sudden cry of pain tells her all she needs to know.

All at once, it’s in motion again, doubling over with its hands pressed to its middle. She follows it down, throwing an arm about its shoulders, feeling it convulse. Jude is still in there and she’s angry.

“Spit her out,” Sasha says. “Now.”

“I’m—trying.”

It cries out again; a garbled, broken sound. One hand finds hers and squeezes; Sasha feels its nails bite. She buries her face in its curls as she holds it, but what she sees are the corridors: twisting, writhing, _recoiling_ from their prisoner. Letting Jude fall was like feeding a glowing coal to a snake. Terrible. Terrible and deadly.

Jude howls and rages against her captor, dousing everything she sees with fire. Wallpaper blackens and peels. Carpets go up in seconds, with a horrifying _whoomph_! Lightbulbs shatter, showering sparks. And Michael – Michael _screams_.

Sasha shakes it, trying to break through. “Michael! _Spit her out!_ ”

“I can’t! I’m trying! I _can’t_!”

She watches it struggle. Watches as the corridors twist and flip, sending Jude flying. She stumbles and staggers at first, before her feet lose contact with the ground entirely. Her back hits the ceiling, which is the floor now, which is actually the wall adjacent to the floor now, which is actually nowhere at all. She smashes face-first into mirrors, embedding glass in her face. But the glass heats, turns molten and begins to run from its frame, trickling down the walls like lava. Plaster blisters underneath the curling paper. Skirting boards catch. Everything is too hot, too loud, too smoky. Too much.

“Get out!” Michael screams. “Get out, get out!”

Eventually, the corridors tip her at just the right moment; send her sailing through a waiting open door. The echoing slam quells the flames, leaving behind a terrible, silent darkness.

“Michael?” Sasha draws herself back to look it over. “Are you – ”

She doesn’t know what to ask. _Are you okay? Are you dying?_ In the end, no words make it out. Michael stares at her for a long moment, its eyes iridescent as oil spills in the sunlight.

Then, its eyelids flutter. Its shoulders sag.

It pitches forward.

Hits the grass with a far-too-human thud.

And then it’s Sasha’s turn to scream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You knew this story wasn't going to stay happy, didn't you? :)
> 
> Some Notes: Elias is 100% the one who orchestrated this mess. Realising that Sasha now knows Way Too Much, and is in a perfect position to Tell Jon All Of It, he tried to get her like he got Leitner - except, because he's a slimeball and an opportunist, he made up the convenient lie that would provoke Jude Perry to do it for him. Also! I feel like I should mention that Wells' Fireworks is a real place! You can find it (and lots of other abandoned locations in and around London, which may be of use for your own TMA fics) on remotelondon dot com.
> 
> Please let me know your thoughts on this chapter. They are like so many minerals and nutrients for my poor, parched soul.


	18. Underground

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha has a monster to save.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Wow, this is definitely the longest it's taken me to put a chapter out. I do apologise to those of you who have been here from the start and are used to getting these weekly; since my classes have resumed I've been rushed off my feet! We've made it this far, though, and there isn't much farther to go - in fact, this is the penultimate chapter. Even if it seems, at times, like an update isn't coming, I can assure you it is. It's just... slow going.
> 
> On that note, thank you to everyone who's been reading and commenting on this fic! Your words mean such a lot and have really helped to spur me on.
> 
> One small content warning before we begin: this chapter is bloody. Not hugely, but a little.

It has been months since Sasha looked on Michael with fear – so it’s a shock to her system to realise that, now, she is afraid.

As it turns out, Michael unconscious is far more frightening than Michael awake.

* * *

It doesn’t move when she jostles it, nor when she shouts its name. Just lies there, ragdoll-still, its gold curls glinting rainbow-bright in the afternoon sun. Sasha almost has to squint to look at it. Without thinking, she begins to feel for a pulse at its throat, breath at its mouth – as if Michael could be relied upon to have a pulse, or breath, or any of the normal hallmarks of life, at the best of times. She draws her hand away and slaps herself, hard, across the cheek. She needs to think.

Its body, when she rolls it onto its back, feels as fragile as wet newspaper. Like a mistimed nudge might send her fingers tearing through its skin. Its eyelids flutter slightly, blond lashes fanning over cheeks which have turned white and pallid and sick in a way Sasha didn’t know they could. And it _is_ breathing, in an awful fashion. Little rattling gasps that make her think of broken pipes.

“Michael,” she says uselessly. “Come on. Wake up.” She shakes it again, as roughly as she dares; when its head lolls precariously, she stops for fear it might fall off. “Michael, _please_.”

Again, she feels for a pulse. She doesn’t expect to find one. Or – if she does – she thinks it must be awfully irregular. Like an orchestra that missed their cue; like the patter of rain on a window. A noise devoid of life’s rhythms.

Which is why, when she feels the regular _thud-thud_ of blood rushing through its jugular, dread swells in her abdomen.

_What’s wrong?_ she had asked it, once. Its answer rushes back to her now, as awful and inevitable as the pulse against her fingertips.

_With me? Everything, of course. It’s when something’s_ right _that you know I’m in trouble._

“Don’t do this,” she says to the empty field. “Not here. Not now. Pull yourself together. Please.” She isn’t sure whether she’s talking to Michael or herself, but the words grow thick and scratchy as she speaks them. The next ones wobble on their way out: “Please, no, this can’t be it. Not like this.”

When Michael doesn’t stir, she shuts her eyes and lets the tears spill out of them. “God, Michael. Don’t do this to me. I need you alive.”

* * *

She doesn’t know how long she sits and cries before its eyes snap open. It happens fast, without warning. One moment, she is staring into the middle-distance, watching threads of tall, dead grass sway in the breeze. She is listening to crickets in the undergrowth and feeling numb pain build in her ankles and feet where she kneels upon them. A stone is digging into her left shin and it hurts, but she doesn’t move.

And then Michael rears upright with a cry.

It pitches forward onto hands and knees and just like that, it’s retching.

Sasha moves like a girl on a string, reflexive. She holds its hair back from its face – great fistfuls in both hands – trying not to think about the way it feels: soft and heavy, silky-smooth, exactly how thick ringlets _should_. When she leans close, she can smell it, too. It smells like salt, from a sea she never had to cross; salt from spindrift that slopped over the deck of a lonely, lonely ship. It smells human. Too human.

Michael’s whole body shudders. It makes a truly horrible sound. Sasha doesn’t know what she’s expecting it to bring up, but when the first splashes of blood hit the dirt, she flinches back in shock.

Whose blood is that? Michael Shelley’s? Why – no, how – no, _why_ does it have blood?

_God_ , she thinks. _God, it’s dying_.

It coughs harder, spraying red across the scrubby grass. Some of it fizzes. Some of it – _oh God –_ some of it is _lumpy_. Sasha spies charred little bits of viscera, sizzling in the mud; viscera and something sharper, spikier. She can’t tell what it is until the next clod flies out, this one larger. Baseboard. Michael is coughing up broken bits of baseboard.

And the viscera – _oh_. It’s plaster, half-melted and bloody.

Between shuddery breaths, Michael manages to croak out her name, and alongside it, the word, “Help.”

Sasha doesn’t know how to help. How do you cure something that defies logic by existing? How do you fix that which, by nature, is supposed to be broken? She isn’t up for this, she knows it. But her whole brain is screaming at her to _do something_.

“I’ve got you,” she lies, forcing her voice steady. She helps it out of its coat, as she would if any other friend were sick and overdressed on an afternoon as hot as this one. When that’s done, it resumes its position on all-fours and she rubs circles into its back, feeling each of its vertebrae through the thin material of its jumper. Its? _His_?

“I’ve got you,” she repeats, like a mantra. Lies, lies, lies. “Just – keep coughing for a bit. Get the worst of it out. We’ll fix this, I promise.”

* * *

Time passes strangely in the field, far removed from the noise and bustle of Central London. Michael coughs and coughs, until – after what could be five minutes or forty – it wilts in her arms, letting her take the dead weight of it. She draws it close, feeling its breath on her neck; running her hands along its shoulders, its scalp, its spine. It still feels far too normal.

“We need to get out of here,” she tells it unsteadily.

It nods. Then says, choking out the words like each one of them hurts, “We can’t use the hallways.”

“Can you walk?”

“Maybe.”

Sasha gives it another minute to catch its breath before she stands, offering her hands to haul it up. Shakily, it takes them.

* * *

The walk across the field is arduous. Sasha has to half-drape Michael over her shoulders to keep it from falling down, and even then, it’s a near thing. Its legs tremble as it walks, barely able to hold its weight – were they _designed_ to take weight, she wonders? How do you weigh a delusion? – and its shudders make it tricky to hold onto.

Eventually, they make it out of the marshland and back into urban territory. Sasha guides them to the train station, all the while thinking, _Just a bit further. You've made it this far_. They board with a slew of other passengers, who pay them little mind beyond a few mystified glances. Michael is so tall that, if it weren’t already bent double with pain, it might have to stoop. Sasha ushers it ahead of her, praying to any god that might be listening for a free seat. Mercifully, there’s an unoccupied cubby by the window.

Michael all but collapses into it.

“I have a plan,” Sasha tells it, once she’s settled at its side. More lies.

It gives a hum of understanding, though its eyes have fallen shut, its head lolling back against the headrest. She takes its hand in hers, more for her comfort than its own, and is blessedly relieved that it still has the strength to squeeze her fingers.

“Your corridors,” she begins. “They’re like a digestive system, aren’t they?”

It shrugs.

“Michael? Aren’t they?”

“Yes,” it manages, but coughing seizes it before it can elaborate. Sasha glances around the cabin nervously, hoping no-one else can see the red froth on Michael’s lips. There isn’t anyone close by; just a man absorbed in his broadsheet, and what looks to be a student tapping away at his laptop. Neither looks up at the hacking noise. Michael shudders and wipes its mouth with a hand. “I – suppose,” it finishes.

“Do you know how much of them she damaged?”

“How – much?”

It cracks open an eye to look at her. Swirls and spirals, bloodshot.

Sasha nods. “I know space and time work differently in there. I know there’s not a distance you can give me – no stretch of metres or yards – but you must know the percentage, mustn’t you? How much is broken and how much is still intact?”

It blinks at her, slowly, dazedly. “I do not.”

“Can’t you feel it?”

“Yes,” it says. “But – it isn’t something that can be expressed with your mathematics.”

Sasha fights the urge to growl in frustration. “Well, let’s put it this way,” she tries. “Could you survive losing it?”

Now it chews its lip. She’s never seen it do that before. It looks painful, with the blood drying on its chin. With her free hand, she hunts for a tissue to dab with as it hunts for words. She’s licking the tissue to wet it when it asks, “Lose it how? Have I not – is it not already lost?”

She wipes at its chin. The tissue turns rosy. It’s crazy, what she’s about to suggest, but what else is there?

“I mean,” she says, “if it were to be cut out. Like a section of intestine.”

“How would one – _agh_ —” it breaks off to cough into its hands, letting go of hers. When it lifts its head, its chin is bloody again. “How would one go about removing it?”

Like a surgeon, Sasha thinks. An enterectomy. Take out what’s damaged, sew the two remaining ends together. Good as new. “I’ve got a few ideas. But it’s a moot point if doing that would kill you.”

Its eyes go vacant as it considers. It’s probably wondering how on earth she plans to conduct a surgery on a corridor. In truth, she’s still sketching out the details.

Thankfully, after a minute, it nods. “I don't know if it will work. But I think - I’ll let you try.”

* * *

The train lets them out at Victoria, at which point they're forced to delve into the underground for the tube to Finsbury Park. It’s busier here, packed with commuters heading home from work, and bodies jostle theirs as they move. Worse still, whatever Spiral-effect let Michael through the turnstiles without a ticket the first time seems to have worn off. Sasha has to buy it an Oyster card.

“I would offer to pay you back,” it says, “but I can’t remember how these work.”

“Just get through this,” she grits out in reply. “Just live. That’s compensation enough.”

The bodies thicken as they head down the long escalators, into the belly of Central London. So does the smell: of perfume; of smoke; of sweat. Sasha feels, as always, like she’s sliding down a throat. She tries to distract herself by looking at the posters which surround them – advertisements for new books coming out in autumn; West End musicals championed by glittery, smiling faces – but the expanses of white tile between each one seem to get bigger as the escalator shunts them down. Instead, she turns to Michael, gripping its coat. It wraps its arms around her, both for comfort and to help it stay on its feet.

“I don’t miss this,” it says, randomly, when they’re halfway.

Sasha blinks, wondering when Michael would ever have needed to take the tube – then she remembers. “Oh. No, I imagine not.”

“Too loud. Too dirty,” it carries on. It rests its chin on her head. “Too much.”

“Are you okay?”

“No. My hallways have been torched.”

“ _Apart_ from that.”

“…Yes. I think so.”

At the foot of the escalator, there's a gush of people: feet skitter over the metal grates, frantic in their dash for various platforms. Sasha steers Michael the familiar route, and soon enough they’re loitering with a crowd of thirty or more, waiting for their tube to arrive. She doesn’t know what time it is, but that doesn’t matter. The tubes come like clockwork unless they’re delayed; it will show up when it wants to, and they will have to deal with it.

Today, it arrives mercifully quick. Michael looks fit to faint again as they stagger on board; so much so that a man and his wife get up to let them sit together. Sasha thanks them earnestly, then hands Michael a wad of tissues, in case it’s overtaken by another coughing fit. With no guarantee that the Spiral’s power will obscure the details from the general public, the last thing they need is for it to start spewing blood over the commuters.

Stops rush by. One, two.

“Stop jogging your knee,” says Michael in her ear. “Just – relax.”

She lets her eyes fall from the station map and shuts her eyes, counting to seven with her breaths. When she opens her eyes again, they almost instantly lock with those of the woman sat across from them. She’s older – perhaps sixty – dressed in a polka-dotted rain mac, with a grocery bag clutched between veined hands. Her face is rosacea-pink.

“Alright, dears?” she asks them. She has to repeat herself twice for Sasha to hear her over the whoosh of the tube, even as Sasha leans forward and cranes her neck.

“Yes, thank you,” she answers, half a shout.

When she leant forward, Michael leant with her, like a vine attached to a falling post. It keeps her there, bent over, with its head pillowed in the crook of her neck.

“What’s wrong with him?” the old lady asks.

Sasha tries to think. She hadn’t planned any excuses, too busy figuring out how to handle the surgery. If she says Michael has a sickness, people might think he’s contagious; might worry and move away. If she says he’s injured, someone might call a doctor, or the police. She doesn’t want to cause a stir.

“Chemotherapy,” she manages.

The lady’s eyes go wide with understanding. “Oh. Poor dear – poor dear. The nausea’s awful. My husband had to go through the same…” More stations rattle past as the lady tells her story. It’s short and disjointed – muffled in places by the roar of the underground, the tinny bass from someone’s headphones, the chatter of the passengers further down – but Sasha listens as well as she can. It’s that or stay inside her head, where the terror is. Michael slumps against her drunkenly – God, why didn’t she just say it was _drunk?_ – and barely seems to care that she’s ignoring it. Sasha doubts it has the energy to hold a conversation; it scarcely looks as though it can do more than cling to her.

Eventually, the tube slides into Finsbury Park station, and it’s their cue to go.

Sasha only hopes they’ve made it fast enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with me this far!  
> I’m both nervous and excited to say that the next chapter will be the last. There will be an epilogue to accompany it – which is why this fic is marked at 20 chapters – but that will be much shorter. (I may also, at some stage, consider adding some deleted scenes as separate one-shots, but that depends on whether I have time to write them (and whether anyone would like to see them!))  
> I’d like to say the next chapter will be up in a fortnight, but again, that depends on school. I’ve got some assignment deadlines drawing near, and I don’t want to rush the finale. It will, however, definitely be up within a month! Until then, have a lovely Halloween, everyone.


	19. The Hallways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sasha attempts surgery.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …Wow, I really did take the full month to get this chapter out, didn’t I?  
>  This was 90% due to my assignments, though the new Distortion lore that dropped recently has had me scrambling to see how it fits into my understanding of the Spiral. (I’ve decided simply to continue as I am, and save any drastic re-interpretation for other fics.)  
>  Thank you to everyone who commented on the last chapter! I am very grateful for your encouragement (and your patience). Warnings for this chapter include… I’m honestly not sure if it counts as surgery, but I’m going to say surgery.

Michael’s legs give out when they’re halfway across the park.

Sasha feels it slipping, but she can’t catch it in time. It lands gracelessly, shoulder-first, and she goes down with it. Pain shoots up through her knees where the gravel bites into them.

“Michael! Shit, I’m sorry.”

She scrambles upright as fast as she can, not wanting to crush it under her weight. It groans: a low, scraping sound like a blade being dragged along a wall.

“You okay?” she asks, willing it to haul itself up beside her. It doesn’t. Its hair is everywhere, hiding its face; its hands; the pained hunch of its shoulders. She reaches out to draw back the curtain and finds it drooling blood. “Oh, jeez.”

“I can’t get up,” it manages. “Just – leave me.”

“No.” Sasha sets her jaw. “No, we’ve come this far.”

“I _can’t get up_ ,” it repeats, spitting red. The puddle of blood forming on the path looks like spilled oil, swirling with iridescence. Its tears are the same. Sasha hadn’t noticed it was crying. When had it started? Just now? Or had it been crying this whole time?

“Then _sit_ up,” she says, as commandingly as she can muster. Her voice still quavers. “That’s all you have to do. Okay? Sit up and let me carry you.”

* * *

Even human, Michael would be hard to carry. All long limbs, sharp elbows, and that chaotic tangle of hair. But Michael isn’t human and its body doesn’t play by human rules. Its skin makes hers go numb, then hot, then cold, then numb again. She’ll think she has a tight grip on it, only for it to slip between her fingers.

The biggest problem, Sasha finds, is that she can’t tell what it weighs. At times, it feels like a life-sized doll in her arms, bulky and awkward and heavy enough to make her muscles ache. She understands why, at first touch, Jude mistook it for one of the Stranger’s horde. At other moments, holding it – and _keeping_ hold of it – is no different from cradling a helium balloon.

Still, she manages, with one arm supporting its upper back and the other looped around its knees. Michael hugs close, hiding its face in the crook of her neck. She gets the sense it doesn’t like being carried very much.

“Nearly there?” it asks at intervals. Its voice is thin with pain and fear.

“Nearly,” she sputters in reply. It takes almost all her effort just to keep hold of it, let alone climb up to her flat; she has no spare breath for talking. A few times, she trips and loses track of its body. One time, she almost throws it down the stairs. Each near-miss makes her stomach lurch.

Eventually, she makes it to her flat, and the sight of the front door makes her sob with relief. She sets Michael down in the hallway while she fumbles for her key. In the same moment, she spies a dark patch of its blood on her shirtfront, where its face had pressed. There’s so much blood, she thinks. _So_ much. A human would need to go to hospital. How much more can Michael stand to lose?

The door swings open and she hauls it inside, barrelling through to her bedroom where she sets it down atop the sheets. Only then does she double back and slam her front door closed.

“I have a plan,” she calls to Michael from the living room, hunting through her satchel for her phone. Her nails catch on lint. It hurts. She doesn’t stop. “Just wait there, okay?”

A strangled sound she takes for an affirmative. She doubts it could get up if it wanted to. Sasha scrolls fervently through her contacts until she finds the number she wants. Then – with a whispered prayer – she dials.

* * *

Tim picks up on the second ring. “Sash? What’s up?”

“Oh, thank God,” she splutters. “I thought you might be busy.”

“I’m on tea break. Are you alright?”

“No, but I don’t have time to explain. I need your help. Can you get out of work?”

“Yes, of course,” he says at once. “What do you need?”

He didn’t even hesitate. Sasha thinks she might cry. “I need – do you remember last summer, when you got really into DIY?”

“You mean when I assembled your bookcase?”

“Yeah – and didn’t you keep doing things like that? More complicated things?”

“Yeah, I did. Sash, what’s going on—”

“I told you, I can’t explain. I just – do you still have your tools?”

“…Yes.”

“Great. I need them.”

A pause. Sasha paces restlessly as she waits for his reply, wiping an errant tear from her cheek. She knows it’s a crazy request. She just hopes – desperately – that it’s not too crazy for Tim.

“You need them _now_?” he says at last.

“As soon as you can get them, please. It’s sort of an emergency.”

“Alright,” says Tim. “I’ll fake sick. Are you home? I’ll need to get them from my flat first – I reckon I can be there in an hour.”

Now Sasha starts to properly cry. Big, gulpy sobs, which she does her best to smother over the line. “Yes, I’m home. Thank you, Tim. Oh, my God, thank you.”

* * *

He arrives, just as he said, about an hour later. Sasha spends the wait kneeling next to the bed, smoothing Michael’s hair and – for lack of better ideas – checking its temperature with the back of her hand. (Scalding.) All the while, she mutters useless comforts – “it’s okay,” and “not long now,” – while it tries to stay awake.

When the door buzzer goes, it startles a yelp from her lips.

Michael smiles, just a bit. “Your friend?”

Sasha stands on shaky legs and heads out into the living room, shutting the bedroom door this time so Tim can’t catch a glimpse of the monster sprawled inside. When she reaches the front door, she finds Tim dishevelled, sweat beading at his temples. He must’ve run here from the station. At his side sits one of those plastic toolkits, laden with all manner of screwdrivers, pliers, hex keys, hammers and wrenches. Sasha is hit with a flash of memory: the day he bought it, and showed her each item inside with barely-contained glee.

“What’s a hex key?” she had asked him then, politely curious.

To which he had answered, delighted: “I have _no idea_.”

Next to the toolkit lies a bulging duffel bag, which – once they’ve hugged hello – he drags into her living room and unzips. It contains a cordless electric chainsaw.

“Tim, you are an _angel_ ,” she blurts when she sees it.

He stands and levels her a worried look. “I don’t know what you need these for, but I want you to know that I— wait, is that— do you have _blood_ on you?”

Sasha starts and follows his gaze. She’d forgotten about her blouse. If she had remembered, she would’ve changed it – hidden it – but she’d been too busy fretting over Michael. At least the dried blood looks human.

“It’s not mine,” she says. Then, realising how that sounds, she adds, “I can’t explain.” She keeps talking before Tim can protest, silencing him with a gentle hand. “I don’t have time. Not now. Tomorrow, I’ll tell you everything – and I mean _everything_. I promise. I just – I need you to trust me until then.”

Tim looks stricken.

“Just tell me two things,” he says. “Two things now, and I’ll wait for the rest.”

Sasha swallows. It feels like there’s chalk in her throat when she says, “Okay.”

“First off, are you safe?”

She swallows again, more thickly. None of what she’s planning this afternoon is safe. But – knowing he won’t leave her side if she says otherwise – she nods. “I’ll be fine.”

“Good,” he says. Just like that, he believes her. He counts the next question on his fingers. “Two: are you trying to dispose of a body?”

The absurdity of the words, combined with the grave look on his face, almost makes her laugh. “Oh, Tim,” she splutters. “I wouldn’t – I’m not using – I’m not doing anything illegal with your power tools. I’m not – I wouldn’t make you an accessory without telling you. Who do you think I am?”

She sounds a tad hysterical, and she knows it, but she can’t control her voice. Tim, at least, looks relieved. “I mean,” he shrugs, “I’d still offer. If you needed help. I’d be an accessory for you, Sash. But I would rather know what I was getting into, so that I could lie to the police!”

He goes for a smirk and a wink which doesn’t make the situation feel any less weird. Sasha titters. “Well, thank you. I’ll keep you in mind, next time I have to kill a guy.”

“Please do!”

* * *

When he’s gone, the apartment feels much larger; empty and echoing like it’s been hollowed out. Sasha stares down at the duffel bag and feels a little nauseous. This is it: her moment of reckoning. There’s no more time to waste.

Michael is still lying down when she drags the bag inside. It looks much the same as before: pale, a little blotchy in the cheeks, with a smear of red on its lower lip. She leaves the toolkit in the doorway, because it’s heavy and she isn’t sure whether she’ll need it. The chainsaw is the thing. At Michael’s bedside, she drops back into a kneel, less because it’s easier to talk that way and more because her legs can’t hold her up. She’s so scared.

“Michael,” she starts. “It’s time. I have a plan.”

Michael opens its eyes and immediately frowns at her. So much for keeping her terror under wraps. You know things are bad when your doctor starts to panic. “What is it?”

“First off, I need you to conjure a door.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, _no_?”

“If I conjure a door, you’ll try and go through it.”

It’s staring at her like this is simple maths; like she’s a fool for not getting it. She would be tempted to slap that look off its face, if it wasn’t already in such a pathetic condition. “Yes, Michael,” she says tersely. “That’s the idea.”

Again, it tells her, “No.”

“If you don’t do this, you’ll die.”

“Yes.”

“Then why won’t you?”

It blows out an exasperated breath. “I could die at any minute now. _Any minute_ , Sasha. If you’re in the hallways when that happens, you won’t make it out. _You_ will die as well. I will kill you. Or I might not – and that, I think, would be worse.”

Sasha rocks on her heels, scrabbling to grasp what it means. It explained its life to her, once, didn’t it? In the café. _There are no means of permanently killing me_ , it had said. But also, _I might be something else by the end_.

“Oh.”

She imagines a creature stepping out from behind a yellow door, human in appearance but odd, ethereal, _wrong_ in the way it moves. Its laugh skitters like panic up and down the length of a spine, and its reflection makes no sense. _Distorted_.

But this creature doesn’t wear the face of Michael Shelley. It wears the face of Sasha James. The bloodstain on its blouse, like the ink-smudges on Michael’s fingertips, will never wash away. And her smile will never be her own again.

She shakes her head to clear the thought away. “It doesn’t matter.”

Michael’s frown becomes a scowl. “It matters.”

“It _doesn’t matter_ ,” she repeats, “because it’s not going to happen. Okay? I’m not going to die. I’m going to save your life. How many times have you saved mine? I owe you. Let me pay you back, this once.”

It averts its eyes. “I don’t want to.”

“Michael.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking,” it pleads.

She does, though. She saw inside its head: saw its pain; its horror; its anger, burning hot and sensitive as a fever. Being Michael hurt. Being Sasha would hurt, too; maybe more. _Don’t let them take you alive_ , it had written on her fridge. A warning against the Eye. Because it knew how it felt to be taken and stuffed into something else; torn apart and sewn up different; _ruined_. It knew, and it still knows.

And it doesn’t want that to happen to her.

If this surgery goes wrong, it won’t just have failed to protect her. It will be her destroyer. Murderer and victim, forever wrapped up in each other’s bodies, each other’s selves. “Please,” says Michael. “Don’t do this. Let me go.”

Sasha takes a deep breath. “You trust me, don’t you?”

“You know I do.”

“Then make the door.”

* * *

The corridors are thick with smoke.

Sasha has to double back for a scarf before she’s progressed more than a few paces. This, she wets in the kitchen sink, before fastening it across her nose and mouth. Michael watches her go back and forth without moving from the bed. It looks extremely unhappy.

“Will I be able to talk to you when I’m inside?” she asks it.

“Yes.”

“And I’ll hear you reply?”

“Yes. Now go. You’re wasting time.”

She ignores the acid in the words, reminding herself that everyone gets short-tempered and snippy when they’re in pain. Instead she hefts the chainsaw and charges back through the yellow door.

It’s hard to navigate when the air is so thick and grey. Little particulates float around like flotsam, making her eyes sting. She wants to go back again and hunt for a visor of some kind – Tim might have left one in a pocket of the duffel – but she wasted enough time getting the scarf. She needs to press on.

Gingerly, she gets down on her knees and starts to crawl. The smoke is thinner, closer to the ground, though the air still tastes like it’s burning. The carpet is pale – yellow, she thinks – with a dark runner cutting down the length of it. She follows the runner like a guideline, more by feel than sight.

“Talk to me,” she says to Michael as she crawls.

Its voice comes from everywhere and nowhere. She’s expecting it to echo, in this place – to bounce across the walls – and perhaps it would have, if she were one of its victims, _~~if it wasn’t dying~~_. Instead it’s quiet, unassuming, the way it always is. “Talk to you about what?”

“Anything. I need to keep a gage on how you are.”

“You will leave if I am in distress,” it asks flatly. Or maybe it instructs.

“Yes,” she tells it. “If you don’t think you can hang on, I’ll get out.”

“Good.” It pauses. “I’m afraid, Sasha.”

Silence for the next few metres. Sasha doesn’t tell it not to worry, though the words are there on the tip of her tongue. She just keeps crawling grimly, knowing the best way to alleviate its fear is to get the job done.

Soon, she hits the end of the first corridor. Her forehead almost bumps into a wall. She turns a sharp left – following the carpet runner – and keeps going. The smoke is getting darker now, thicker, and it wafts at her like breath in her face. Sweat beads on her forehead and pricks under her arms. She takes this as a sign she’s getting close.

“What did you do with Jude?” she asks, just to keep it talking. Her voice rasps with the smoke and the heat. If she gets out of this – _no_ , she tells herself, _when_ – she’ll need a full pint-glass of water. Maybe two.

“I spat her out. You saw it.”

“Where?”

“Verkhoyansk. Russia.”

The name means nothing to her. “What made you pick that?”

“It’s in the Arctic Circle.”

Sasha can’t hide her spluttered laugh, though it comes out like a choke. “Oh, brilliant.”

“I suspect it will take her some time to find her way home. Careful, Sasha – you’re approaching the unstable parts.”

Sasha lifts her head and squints through the haze. In the distance she can see the flickering orange of fires yet to be doused. The wallpaper here is peeling in the heat, shrivelling into curls against the skirting boards. Further along, just within her eyeshot, the walls have turned a crispy black.

“Now what?” Michael asks, when her crawl comes to a halt.

“Now for the part you’re not going to like.”

“As opposed to _this_ part, which has been a delight?”

“Shush.” Sasha reaches for the chainsaw – which she had been dragging along in her wake – and forces herself up on shaky legs. She presses forward into the smoke, right up until she finds those blackened walls. The carpet here has burned away, exposing scorched floorboards she doesn’t want to test her weight on. “How are you doing so far?” she calls out, just to stall.

“Fine,” it answers. “Except I’m on fire.”

“You get snarky when you’re hurt,” she says, to distract it from her movements.

“Please just hurry,” it answers.

Tim went through the procedure before he left: how to hold the chainsaw, with both hands; how to stand with your legs a shoulder-width apart. Her hands shake as she sets the blade against the edge of that blackened wall. This is wrong, she knows – there’s a high risk of kickback when you touch the end of a chainsaw to a surface – but how else is she going to slice into the wall?

_You shouldn’t_ , says Tim in her mind. _Chainsaws are only for slicing wood_.

She can’t quite bring herself to squeeze the throttle.

“Okay,” she says, to calm herself. “Take a deep breath.”

“I don’t need to breathe.”

“Well then, brace yourself. Alright?”

“Alright.”

She ducks her head. “I’m sorry, Michael. This is really going to hurt.”

* * *

Michael’s scream is a terrible thing.

Sasha hears it loud and clear over the roar of the chainsaw as she drives it through the wall. Maybe it’s luck, or some harmony between the logic of the Spiral and her own flawed judgement – the fact that this plan _shouldn’t_ work – but the saw passes through the substance of the wall like it’s putty. She slices up from skirting board to ceiling as quickly as she can, then drags the blade across the ceiling to the other side. Dust rains down, forcing her to screw up her eyes and work blind. Then – she hits the next corner. Down, down, she yanks the saw. The lightbulbs in the corridor sway. The chainsaw hardly kicks back at all, though the noise it makes blends somewhere with the screaming, and she thinks that if she gets out alive it will be horribly broken. Problems for later. Finally, she makes it to the floor. Cutting through the carpeting is harder, but she doesn’t want to cut too close to the charred edges, which she’s begun to think of as a wound. This amputation must be clean.

“Nearly there,” she yells, though her voice is lost under the wails of machinery and monsters. When, at last, she has cut a perfect square, she powers off the chainsaw and tosses it aside.

The burnt and blackened corridor begins to drift, then. It’s a snaking movement, like a cat’s toy being pulled away from pouncing paws. The gap in between the two sections hurts Sasha’s brain – it’s dark, it’s light, it’s colour, it’s _nothing at all_ – so she focuses on the wreckage slowly slipping out of reach. Before it can get more than an arm’s length away, she throws herself down onto her stomach and grabs it by the fraying ends.

There is a moment when she hangs there, in the gap between sanity and madness, between existing and falling apart. A moment when, if she overbalanced, she might go tumbling headfirst into something no-one else has ever touched. The Spiral itself.

And then she is rearing back on her knees, heaving with all her might – and the ruined corridor is _contracting_ , shrinking in her grasp. She draws all four ends of it – ceiling, walls, floor – into a bundle that fits between her hands like screwed-up paper, and she pulls on that bundle like a rope, dragging the corridor into itself. Her muscles burn. She finds herself at forty-five degrees, half-walking, half-crawling back. Eventually, the sawed-off end hits what must be the next intact section with a thud. The rope of ruined matter falls away, like an umbilical cord, and Sasha is left holding the end of it.

* * *

Michael’s screams have died off. Silence echoes in their wake.

Sasha stands alone in a pristine hallway.

She turns back the way she came, hefts the mangled chainsaw and walks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> …I still can’t believe the next chapter is going to be the last one. Thank you so much to everyone who’s stuck with me this far. I really appreciate every comment, even if it’s just an emoji. You’re the best.  
>  Also, I recently stumbled across a post recommending this story on tumblr, so if that was you, then thank you very much!


	20. The Harbour At the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last threads are pulled.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...It's here. The final chapter. Wow, I had a blast writing this one.
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who has stuck with me while writing this; reading your comments has made every wall I've hit worthwhile. I really hope you enjoy this finale.
> 
> There are no specific trigger warnings for this chapter, except for the fact that it is Upsettingly Sad.

The door vanishes under Sasha’s fingertips before she has time to swing it shut.

For one shaky moment, she caresses the blank wall, too afraid to look around. Then she braces herself and turns.

Michael has propped itself up onto an elbow and is watching her through glazed, half-lidded eyes. Sweat has stuck some curls to its temples and that red, blotchy flush still stains its cheeks, but it doesn’t look any worse than it did. It blinks at her slowly, taking her in. “Sasha,” it croaks.

Sasha stumbles over and all but falls in her attempt to kneel beside it. Back in the real world with real physics, giddiness and exhaustion have returned, rolling through her skull in buffeting waves. Her arms ache from wielding the chainsaw, then pulling on that rope of ruined hallway. Her feet are sore from the long walk through the marshes and Finsbury Park. She thinks she might be sick if she doesn’t shut her eyes, so she does it fast, burying her face in the duvet for good measure. Her mouth opens to speak – to ask Michael how it feels; whether it worked; whether it’s still dying – but the groan she makes is unintelligible.

Michael reaches for her with its free hand, cradling the back of her head. It feels all wrong again, bony where it shouldn’t be, but gentle. “You are something else,” it says. “I think you did it, you know.”

“Did I?” She tries to raise her head but it feels like a wet sandbag. Michael presses her back down, stroking her hair, and she lets it keep her where she is.

“Yes,” it says. “Thank you.”

“How can you tell?” she tries. “Does it still hurt?”

“Not like it did. It feels tender now, but – clean.”

“…Thank fuck for that.”

* * *

It takes her three tries before she can get back to her feet. When she does, groggily, her first order of business is to check the time on her phone. Almost five-thirty. Part of her was expecting to have lost a week inside the tunnels, but it’s the same day as it was when she entered. One notification glows on the screen: a text from Tim.

_Message me before bed? I want to know you’re alright._

She decides she had better reply before she forgets.

_All done now. Mission success I think. Going to get some rest - thank you for the chainsaw and for not freaking out about all this. I will explain tomorrow x_

She leaves out the part where she _broke_ the chainsaw. That’s a blunder she would like to apologise for in person. Maybe he’ll let her buy him a new one, when payday comes, if she insists hard enough. But she doesn’t have the energy to insist on anything just now.

“I’m going to get you some painkillers,” she says to Michael, sliding her phone into her pocket. “I don’t know if they’ll do anything for you, but it’s worth a try, right? I’m going to have some, too. I can feel a headache coming on.” Before she can duck into the living room, she turns, seized with what must be the most daftly human impulse she’s had in weeks. “Do you… want anything else? I really don’t know what will help right now. There’s tea? Or soup?”

She feels like Martin, saying it.

Michael lets its elbow drop. Its head falls back against the pillow with a soft thud. “No, thank you. Wait… yes. Tea would be nice.”

“Tea it is.”

She saunters off to brew it without a backwards glance.

* * *

While she’s waiting for the kettle to boil, she decides to email Jon.

_Hi Jon,_

_Sorry I didn’t make it back this afternoon. You probably won’t get this until morning, but I just wanted to let you know – the field trip went a little awry. I’ll make a statement about it tomorrow. When I get in, that is. Circumstances are tricky at the moment and I might need a couple of hours in the morning to get sorted. Don’t wait for me. I’m sure you have other things to get on with._

_And you’ll want to get on with those things first, because honestly, I think my statement might take quite a while. There’s a lot I need to tell you – more than just what happened at the factory. That time I told you I’d been mugged… The Dufresne manor… I haven’t been honest with you these last few months. Not for any nefarious reason, I promise, just anxiety – but I can’t keep dodging around it. And it doesn’t feel right, not telling you things. I’d like to make amends._

_If you can snag Tim off Elias, I’d like him to hear it too. If you can’t, that’s alright. He can listen to the recording later. So can Martin._

_See you tomorrow,_

_Sasha._

Her eyes get misty when she presses _send_.

It’s alright, she tells herself. Things will be alright. She doesn’t need to think about tomorrow. All that matters right now is getting through the night.

She stands shakily and fetches down two mugs. Pours the hot water, slow and careful; stirs in milk and tosses the used teabags into the bin. The ritual of it calms her. This evening, she tells herself, will pass like any other. They’ll drink their tea, and when they’ve finished, she’ll see if Michael needs anything else. She’ll sit up with it, keeping it company and assessing it for lingering signs of damage. If it wants her to, she’ll read to it. She’s done that once or twice before, when they’ve run out of things to say to each other. Or maybe they’ll sit shoulder-to-shoulder and watch a show on her laptop. Like two human friends might do.

* * *

To start with, the evening _does_ pass like any other. Sasha perches tiredly on the edge of the bed, breathing in steam and taking only sparing sips from her mug, while Michael sits beside her, propped against the headboard with three pillows behind its back. Its complexion settles from fever-red to its usual cold-nipped rose within the hour, though it retains a wounded-animal look about it, hunching in at the shoulders and occasionally wincing when it shifts too much. Sasha has no idea whether the tea was a good idea or not – whether it will actually help it or it’s only a placebo – but she’s still relieved to see it drink. It manages half the mug before its hands start wobbling and it has to set it down.

“You look exhausted,” she tells it, then.

“Yes.”

“Do you sleep?”

It shakes its head. “I haven’t. Not since the Tundra.”

Her breath catches at that.

_Not since the Tundra_.

“What?” It frowns. “Why are you pulling that face?”

“No reason,” she answers quickly. Too quickly. “I’m just worried about you.”

Michael shrugs a shoulder and settles back against the pillows, as if to say she has nothing to be worried about. When it meets her gaze, she can’t tell whether that’s true. Does it know? Does it understand what it just said?

_Not since the Tundra…_

“I think you should try and sleep tonight,” she tells it, pulling herself back on-track before it has the chance to notice. Hers and Michael’s nerves are frayed enough as-is; now is not the time to start pulling on threads. “If you can’t quite manage, then just… lie down and rest. You need to heal. Alright?”

“Alright,” it says. “I’ll try.”

* * *

She checks her email at nine, just as the sky outside begins to tip from pink to inky violet. Jon’s reply is already sitting in her inbox.

_Sasha,_

_I do hope you’re alright. Please take the morning off tomorrow if you need it. I’ll clear my schedule in the afternoon and we can talk._

_– Jon._

She shuts the lid of her laptop and sighs.

* * *

Though the couch was big enough for Jordan to sleep on, Sasha knows it isn’t nearly big enough for her. She made the mistake of sleeping there once before – on a night when she’d been up late reading and hadn’t had the energy to drag herself to bed – and woke up the next morning with a horrible ache in the base of her spine, which took three days to fade. Even napping on its springs for longer than an hour leaves her stiff.

And so, tonight – once she’s showered and changed into pyjamas – she crawls under the covers next to Michael.

It hardly seems to mind. Just shuffles, wordlessly, to make space for her. There is no warmth radiating from its body, which would concern her if it was a person. But in the heat of the summer, the coolness is a blessing, so she nestles close.

Its hair is the only part of it she can make out clearly in the dark, glinting like spun gold on the pillows. Then it turns its head towards her, and its eyes glint too. The streetlights outside impart an orange glow on them through the tiny chinks in her blinds.

“Don’t go,” she tells it. “If you can’t sleep, I mean. Stay here where I can watch you, alright?”

She means it to sound firm, like a doctor imparting a guideline to a patient. _Stay here, so that I can help you if you need it. Stay here, so that you don’t make yourself more sick._ Instead, it comes out childish, almost wheedling. An after-effect of a terrifying day. _Please don’t leave me._

It nods, slow and careful. “Alright. Thank you, Sasha.”

In the dark, it finds her hand. She squeezes the inhuman shape as fiercely as she dares to without hurting it. When it squeezes back, she feels the soft drag of nails against her knuckles, like a sharp and painful comb. It shouldn’t be as comforting as it is.

“Goodnight,” she whispers earnestly.

Its eyes narrow with its smile, like tiny stars winking. “Goodnight.”

* * *

Sasha blinks against the bitter sea wind. In the distance, tiny boats bob on a slate-blue sea, which stretches off and grows bleaker, greyer, until the horizon dissolves into mist. The harbour’s mouth is too narrow for the waves to grow wild here, but she doesn’t for a minute believe them tame. They snap at hulls and gnaw at the gangways like a dog wearing a muzzle.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been staring. Nor how long she’s been here, wherever she is. At length, she becomes aware of a repetitive beeping; the sound of a lorry reversing, opening its mouth. There are workmen bustling past her, hauling crates into the maw of a hovercraft. Cyrillic writing decorates its flank.

She glances down at her feet. Her legs are bare; she’s only wearing shorts and a vest, the same ones she put on before bed. Still, she doesn’t feel cold. She _knows_ it’s cold, yes – knows it as well as she knows the name of the vessel at the end of the gangway, whose painted lettering she cannot quite make out – but she doesn’t feel it.

She isn’t really here, after all. (But neither is she dreaming.)

Michael is waiting by a low brick wall. It stands with its back to her, gazing out at the Tundra. Down on the gangplanks, crewmates are conferring, making ready to leave. An elderly woman stands with them. The wind tears strands of grey hair from the clasp at the nape of her neck, and the thick layers of her coat almost hide the way she hunches against the cold – _almost_. She is not immune to human weaknesses, but all the more formidable in her dismissal of them. Gertrude Robinson. Sasha would recognise her anywhere.

A bad feeling pools in her stomach as she moves to stand at Michael’s side.

“What are we doing here?” she asks it.

Michael answers without turning to meet her gaze. Its steely eyes are locked on the cluster of crewmates; on Ms Robinson, waving her hand as she talks.

“ _Are_ you here?” it says, detachedly. The words are too flat to be a question, and so quiet the wind almost smothers them. “You’ve been here a few times now, except you haven’t really. It likes to play games with me, you see. It gets hard to tell what’s real and what isn’t.”

Sasha stares for a long time at the man beside her before she dares to speak again. “You’re not Michael.”

“No?” He laughs without mirth. “No… I suppose I’m not anymore.”

“Who are you?” she pushes. She knows already, but she wants to hear him say it.

“I don’t like questions,” he says instead.

“Michael Shelley,” she tells him. “Your name is Michael Shelley.”

“Is it.” He doesn’t sound much like he cares.

“Where are we, Michael?”

“This is the harbour where we boarded. I don’t know what it’s called. Something Russian. I come back here sometimes. This is the last place I could’ve turned around.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Regret what?”

“Not turning around.”

“We’ve had this conversation before.”

“No, we haven’t.”

“Haven’t what?”

He looks at her now, and there is something shiny in his eyes; something fragile, like black ice forming on the skin of a puddle. Madness. It jabs like a needle in her heart, and Sasha feels a sudden urge to throw her arms around him. She resists only because - technically - they're strangers. How long has he been trapped here? Alone, like this?

“You could have let me die,” he says, in a voice brittle with splinters. “You could have let it break and let me die.”

“Are you angry?”

He sways a little. Turns to stare again at the Tundra – at Gertrude – his smile a thin and painful thing. “No,” he lies. “What would be the point in that?”

“I’m sorry.”

A laugh like something shattering. “It’s yourself you’ve damned, you stupid thing.”

“What?”

The smile twists; grows mean. She never thought he could look mean. “You know it doesn’t care about you. Not really. It wants you dead.”

“What does? You don’t mean – _Michael_?”

“ _I will wait, Archivist_ ,” he hisses. “ _I may not be able to kill you myself, but I will wait until you’re weak. I will find a chink in your armour. And I will ruin you_.” The words give way to more of that awful, unhinged laughter. It sounds wrong coming from a human, especially this one. Michael hunches his shoulders inwards, trying to control the grin on his face. “You remember, don’t you? You remember what it said to her? In the stacks?”

Sasha does. She knows those words from the final tape she listened to; the one where Gertrude made her monster cry. They hugged afterwards, when she came home from work. The first proper hug of many. And then it took her hopping around the globe. She hadn’t thought about those terrible words since.

But then: she hadn’t known, until now, what they meant.

“I’m the chink in the armour,” she says, wishing she didn’t believe it. “Aren’t I?”

“Very good,” says Michael. “If only you’d figured that out faster.”

“Is it going to kill me?”

“Probably. Soon.” He shrugs. “Maybe it’ll play with you a little longer, first.”

He isn’t lying. She knows what Michael Shelley looks like when he lies, and this isn’t it. But – just this once – she wishes she could pretend otherwise. Maybe it’s the madness, she tells herself. Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s saying, or at least, not well enough to differentiate between truth and lie. But no. His eyes are too clear right now; too honest, too pitying. He knows what he’s saying and it’s all horribly true.

“We’re friends,” she says anyway. Her last defence.

“Yes, we are,” he answers.

“I meant—”

“I know what you meant. _It_ is not your friend. It never can be.”

“But—”

“Sasha. Please.” He grabs her by the biceps then, forcing her to face him. It’s so sudden she almost lashes out in protest. Instead, she freezes. Stares. His eyes, wide and gleaming with urgency – devoid of that iridescent sheen – _is he going to cry_? His cheeks, all pink with windchill. She remembers standing forehead-to-forehead with a monster in the dark. A monster who also wore this face. “I don’t know if you’re really here, but if it’s you – if it’s _really_ you – I need, I need to warn you before it’s too late. You need, you need to get away from it. From us. From _me_.”

“Michael, I—”

“ _Please_.” He shakes her, just a little. Gentle, but frantic, and his fingertips are gripping hard enough – she thinks – to leave bruises. “They’re all monsters, Sasha. You can’t trust any of them. Don’t – don’t – don’t let them take you—”

“Alive,” she says. “Don’t let them take me alive.”

“ _Yes_.”

“It said it loved me.”

“It does.” He’s almost weeping now, the first tears glittering on his lashes. “It does. It’s my fault, I’m sorry.” He draws a gasping breath. “The Distortion – that _thing_ – cannot love anyone. But _I_ can. And it’s… it’s… it’s me now. Enough of me to count. The people it loves…”

He trails off into a grimace. Sasha flashes back to the statements she found tucked away in the stacks, that night she stayed late. The horrible things it did, to torment Gertrude after she had damned it. _You made me love you. This is what my love looks like._

“It didn’t hurt Rosie,” she says. She’s trying to backpedal, to find reasons to doubt him, though she knows she shouldn’t; knows it isn't fair. Doubt is all he’s had since the Great Twisting. He deserves, for once, to be believed.

“That was me,” he says, or pleads. “I stopped it. I waited and waited for a chance to catch it off guard. God, you don’t know how long I’ve _waited_.”

The lack of discord, of echo in its voice, when it had sat with Rosie in the reception… she had thought it an act.

Michael is crying now. “I waited for this, too. The injury – it’s too weak to stop me. But it won’t be, come tomorrow. This is it. This is the only chance I have. Please. _Please_ believe me, Sasha. I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t, I, I don’t want to hurt _anyone_.”

Sasha can feel something inside her tearing. She doesn’t want to believe him. She really doesn’t. It would be so easy to shove him away. To succumb to the lies, even if they killed her in the end.

When she raises her hands, he flinches, like he’s expecting to be struck. _We’ve had this conversation before_ , he said. Is that what the Distortion did, when it tricked him? Did it hit him and shove him away?

Gently, she pries his hands from her arms. His grip goes slack at once, arms floundering at his sides like lost things. So much fear in his eyes. She steps forward and brushes the tears from his cheeks, as gently as she can.

“I believe you,” she says, and wraps her arms around him, pulling him into a hug. It must be first contact he’s had in years. He goes very still before he relaxes; before his arms remember what to do. Then he crumples against her, clinging to her like a buoy. She clings back just as fiercely. “It's alright, Michael. Shh, it's alright. I believe you.”

* * *

Sasha wakes first.

It’s ten past nine – the time of day when she would ordinarily be sitting at her desk, setting up, a case file and a coffee at her elbow – but thanks to Jon, she knows she doesn’t have to be in work ‘til twelve. She sits up slowly, shaking off the strange dreamlike feeling that tries to cling to her. She thinks she can still smell the sea.

Michael is asleep at her side, eyes flickering beneath their lids. It looks like a doll in the morning light. Or at least, it does until a frown furrows its brows, and consternation starts to tug at the corner of its mouth. It’s trying to wake up, she guesses, but it can’t. She probably has Michael Shelley to thank for that. Who knows what it might do, now that its schemes have been revealed? _I will find a chink in your armour…_

She still doesn’t want to believe it would hurt her. It promised her it wouldn’t. But who made that promise, really? Who was it that held her close and told her it loved her?

She felt its hatred, that day in the stacks. If it does love her, it hates Gertrude more. And ultimately, she knows, that’s all that matters.

She dresses quickly – in smart black trousers and a simple green blouse – deciding she had better leave before it wakes. It's in the bathroom mirror that she finds the bruises. Four on each arm, small and purple-red. A painful ghost. The last tangible evidence of a man named Michael Shelley.

For a few minutes, all she can do is examine them in her reflection, turning this way and that. Fitting her fingers into the marks. Her bag is still packed from yesterday; all she has to do is fill a bottle of water. When she’s ready to leave – at nine-thirty – she finds herself drifting back to the door of her bedroom, lingering there to watch her monster shift and mumble in its dreams. Should she leave a note, she wonders? Will it still be here when she returns?

Her eyes water. Quickly – recklessly – she crosses the room to its side. She can’t resist the urge to brush some of its curls from its forehead. To smooth the crease between its brows with a kiss.

“Goodbye, Michael,” she whispers.

And then she turns and is gone.

* * *

Michael wakes in the early evening, with a gasp like a half-drowned animal clawing its way out of a barrel. It stares around the bedroom in hazy disbelief. What woke it? The chink of keyrings; the twist of a key in a lock.

It stands on shaky legs, still weak, still aching inside. Next door, in the living room, someone is humming. Sasha. The sound is warm. It draws near.

When it crosses the threshold, it freezes.

There is a woman in a red blouse and white trousers, pouring tea at the kitchen counter. She hasn’t noticed yet that she has company. Behind her, on the fridge door, an old message waits in messy magnet-letters. A reply to its _Good morning, Sasha_ :

_Time isn’t real_.

Its smile forms and sours in the same jittering heartbeat. It looks again at the woman, who - of course - is not actually a woman. There’s a mechanic jerk to her limbs as she stirs in the sugar. A jerk it immediately recognises; immediately understands. And yet, absurdly, the artificial motion is not what hits it like a punch to the still-healing gut. It’s the fact that Sasha never took sugar in her tea.

“No,” it murmurs softly to itself. This makes the woman lift her head. “No,” it repeats, louder. “Not Sasha. Not her.”

And it isn’t.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...Sorry. I did warn you from the start that this was going to be sad.
> 
> If you're still here, thank you so much. I really appreciate everyone who has taken the time to read this (and if you have any thoughts you'd like to share, please do! I will absorb the energy and put it into my next fic.)
> 
> I tried to tie up all the loose ends I could in this chapter, but if there are still a few fraying bits, feel free to point them out to me and I will try and clarify.
> 
> One question I'm already anticipating: Does this mean that Sasha didn't get to give Jon her statement, explaining everything? Yes. In this timeline, Sasha enters the office to give her statement at the exact moment the shelf falls in his office, sparking the beginning of Jane Prentiss's attack. It's a tragedy.
> 
> Thank you again, everyone, and if you celebrate it: happy Christmas.


End file.
